[Investigation on degradation of polypropylene/stabilizers composites irradiated by gamma rays]

The degradation behavior of polypropylene and polypropylene/stabilizer composites, caused by gamma radiation, was studied in the present work The stabilizers used were hindered phenol antioxidant and hindered amine light stabilizer. FTIR spectroscopy and DSC analysis were used to determine the structural variation induced by gamma radiation. It can be seen that the evolution of PP and composites PP/stabilizers on gamma irradiation is an increase in absorbance in the hydroxyl and carbonyl absorption regions. Carbonyl index calculated from FTIR spectra was used to characterize the rate of degradation. When the irradiation dose was small (<50 kGy), the degradation of pure polypropylene and polypropylene/stabilizers composites was not obvious; while the irradiation dose increased (> or =50 kGy), the carbonyl indexes of all the samples increased obviously, and the degradation degree of polypropylene/stabilizer composites was bigger than pure polypropylene. This result might be partially attributed to the molecular chain scission of hindered phenol and hindered amine under larger irradiation dose. The chain scission of stabilizers forms hydroperoxides and peroxide radicals, catalyzing the degradation of polypropylene. As the irradiation dose was small (<50 kGy), the crystallization temperatures of pure polypropylene and polypropylene/stabilizer composites all showed no remarkable changes; as the irradiation dose exceeded 50 kGy, the crystallization temperatures of pure polypropylene and polypropylene/stabilizer composites all decreased obviously. Correspondingly, the melting peaks of both pure polypropylene and polypropylene/stabilizer composites moved to lower temperature and split into two peaks with increasing the irradiation dose. The decrease of crystallization and melting temperatures might be attributed to the destruction of chemical structure and stereo-regularity of the molecular chain, due to the increasing of carbonyl and hydroxyl groups brought by the oxidation of polypropylene molecular chain. At the same irradiation dose (> or = 50 kGy), the crystallization and melting temperatures of polypropylene/stabilizer composites were lower than that of pure polypropylene. It indicates that the stabilizers accelerate the degradation of polypropylene. The results were accordant with the IR results.