Hydrolysis degradation of polycarbonate under microwave irradiation by using design of experiment software

Abstract

Depolymerization of polycarbonate (PC) is one of the important issues in environment especially in industry field. In this project degradation of PC is done by employing the hydrolysis method using microwave irradiation. PC degradation was carried out under constant amount of tetrahydrofuran (THF) as co-solvent and by using various amount of water (H2O) as main solvent and different concentration of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) as catalysts in a microwave reactor for low power and different time. The solid main product bisphenol A (BPA) was analyzed by FTIR and HPLC. It was found that PC degradation is favored by increasing amount of H2O, concentration of NaOH and time duration of process. Complete depolymerization was found to occur in 12.5 min when the amount of water was 3.5 g and concentration of NaOH was 0.5 g at 110°C.