A New Approach to Analyze the Initiated Thermal Destruction of Polycarbonate

It is established by the method of dynamic thermogravimetric analysis that bismuth dimethyldithiocarbamate (DMDTC), which protects a number of polymers from heat and light, accelerates the thermal destruction of polycarbonate (PC) based on bisphenol A and is, in this case, an initiator of the thermal destruction. The kinetics of the multistage process of the initiated thermal destruction of PC is modeled by the method of nonlinear regression analysis. The peculiarity of the proposed approach lies in estimating the parameters of the Arrhenius equation for each of the stages together for all temperature programs. It is shown that such an analysis allows us to avoid the limitations characteristic of the Kissinger (Kiss) and Kissinger–Akahira–Sunose (KAS) methods, which are traditionally used to determine the activation energies of thermal destruction of polymers.