Viscoelastic properties of vis-breaking polypropylenes

In this work hydrogen peroxide is used as a green initiator to cause scissioning of polypropylene (PP) with water as the only by-product replacing the organic peroxides that are usually used. The rheological properties of a commercial polypropylene and of the scissioned samples are determined by dynamic rheology and an inversion procedure for converting the linear viscoelastic data into molar mass distribution has been adopted. The results presented show that the molar mass distribution of the PP polymer is narrowed on scissioning. The process is found to produce polymers similar in molecular architecture and behavior to organic peroxide cleaved materials, the results of which are given as a comparison in this work.