Kinetics of thermal oxidative degradation of phosphorus-containing flame retardant copolyesters

The thermal oxidative degradation of phosphorus-containing copolyester and poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) in air were studied by thermogravimetric analysis (TG) in order to obtain the activation energies of pyrolysis. The activation energies were determined using the Kissinger method and the Flynn-Wall-Ozawa method, which do not require knowledge of the reaction mechanism (RM). The results show that there is no large difference between the values of activation energy of phosphorus-containing copolyester and PET, which suggests that the flame retardants studied do not greatly influence the mechanisms of pyrolysis. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.