“To demonstrate the feasibility to produce polycarbonates and/or polyamides by using reactive extrusion (REX), which is considered a greener technology being a continuous process, which minimizes and even avoids the use of solvents and also reduces reaction times and overall energy consumption. Alternative monomers capable of being produced from CO2 will be considered to produce those polycarbonates and/or polyamides. »
REx has significant value as it is a process that can be easily adapted to an industry infrastructure. The design of these synthetic approaches at AIMPLAS will be addressed considering a broad selection of process parameters and conditions such as residence time, temperature, screw configuration, catalyst type (commercial and developed in the project) in different concentrations and relative ratio of the monomers. The polymers developed will be broadly characterized to evaluate macromolecular, mechanical, thermal and rheological properties, thus, in particular molar mass, intrinsic viscosity, and so on, will be monitored.”
The studies will be started at lab scale in a Haake Minilab Extruder, which will be further evaluated at larger scale in a Brabender rheometer. Technical and economic feasibility has been evaluated in order to test higher scale in twin-screw extruders at pilot plants in AIMPLAS. Additionally, and along the technical viability evaluation of scaling-up, process simulations will be considered by using software such as Ludovic® and evaluating the screw designs.
Selected process towards polycarbonates and/or polyamides) will be optimized and obtained polymer material(s) will be characterized in-depth. Feasibilities studies will be carried out, including a state-of-the-art survey to identify a range of biopolymers grades that can be obtained by REX, and their potential applications as well as potential market sector.
