Research overview
Mechano-chemistry is an emerging field of chemistry. Reactions are driven not by thermal energy, electrons or photons but rather by mechanical strain, which can lower the activation energy that needs to be overcome for bond cleavage.
This strain can, for example, be applied in a ball mill, which we use to convert polymers to monomers in the solid phase. Instead of adding a catalyst as powder to the ball mill, we functionalize the grinding spheres directly. This significantly improves performance. The catalyst is placed right where the energy input into the system is the highest, at the impact point of the spheres. In addition, this patented surface activated mechano-catalyst (SAM cat) avoids difficulties in bringing the powder catalyst, polymer and grinding spheres together at the same location at the same time. We are currently upscaling this technology to the kg-scale.
We also found that cheap additives, like sand can act as radical initiators to promote depolymerization
