Fast successive self-nucleation and annealing (SSA) thermal fractionation protocol for the characterization of polyolefin blends from mechanical recycling

The sorting stage of mechanical recycling of post-consumer polyolefins has severe challenges. Polypropylene (PP) is often contaminated with polyethylene (PE) and vice versa. To meet quality requirements, characterization of the recycled pellets is needed. To address this problem, fast characterization generating a statistical assessment of the content of the various batches from recycling is required. This investigation shows that the use of fast scanning rates (in a conventional Differential Scanning Calorimeter) in the successive self-nucleation and annealing (SSA) protocol can reduce the thermal fractionation time, without losing resolution power, as long as the increase in heating/cooling rate is compensated by reducing sample mass. Using a “coupled SSA protocol” for polypropylene and polyethylene fractions at a rate of 10 °C/min, the measurement time is approximately 420 min. Implementing mass compensation, faster heating rates (i.e., 30 °C/min) and using a single-fraction protocol, sufficient to determine the content of PP and high-density PE, reduced the time of the measurement to 75 min. Examples of fractionations of commercial post-consumer and post-industrial recycled polyolefin blends conducted at a faster rate are provided. The derived polyolefin content is compared with the standard temperature rising elution fractionation analysis to assess the validity of the proposed method.