Chemical recycling of sulfur-cured natural rubber using supercritical carbon dioxide

摘要

Sulfur-cured unfilled natural rubber (NR) was devulcanized in supercritical CO_2 (scCO_2) by using diphenyl disulfide (DD) as a devulcanizing reagent. The product was fractionated into sol and gel components. The fraction of sol component that contains reusable linear polymer increased with the increase in CO_2 pressure, especially over the critical pressure. The molar mass of the resulting sol component was about tens of thousands and the crosslink density of the gel component decreased from the initial one.