Recycling polymer materials is one method for reducing the amount of material sent to landfill. Ensuring this recycled material is the correct type of polymer is critical to its performance in various applications. ATR can be used as a rapid QC method for assessing the purity of recycled polymers.
ATR offers a benefit over other types of analytical methods as it is very fast, a spectrum can be obtained and run through the chemometric model in tens of seconds, by an operator with minimal training.
To illustrate this, we prepared blends of polyethylene and polypropylene, two similar materials, at known composition and then collected ATR spectra of these blends using the Specac Quest. This data was then analysed using chemometric analysis, a set of statistical tools which can be used to tease out tiny differences in spectroscopic data. This allows us to construct a model that corelates the spectra of our known blends which can then be used to predict unknown blends.
This would enable end users of recycled polyethylene to be able to set a limit of the maximum amount of polypropylene that can be tolerated in their process and then ensure any material used meets this specification. The same technique could be used to assess blends of many different types of polymers to ensure strict performance criteria are met.
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