Kinetics and mechanism of thermal degradation of vegetable-tanned leather fiber

Abstract: Thermal degradation of vegetable-tanned leather fiber (VLF) was investigated by thermogravimetric analysis aiming to know the exact kinetics and degradation mechanism. The thermogravimetric (TG) and differential thermogravimetric (DTG) curves showed that decomposition of the VLF occurs mainly in the range of 150–600 °C, and the latter exhibits asymmetrical peak with a pronounced shoulder. The decomposition process was first analyzed by deconvolution of the experimental DTG curves, followed by reconstruction of the weight loss profiles of two individual processes. Several common isoconversional approaches were applied to calculate the activation energy over a wide range of conversion for the sample, including modified Kissinger-Akahira-Sunose (MKAS), Friedman, and Flynn-Wall-Ozawa. The average activation energy of vegetable-tanned leather fiber was found to be 241.9 kJ mol− 1 by MKAS method. The activation energy values obtained for the pseudocomponents representing highly-crosslinked and low-crosslinked collagen in VLF were given as 190.6 and 124.8 kJ mol− 1, respectively. Generalized master plots results suggested that the reaction mechanism for highly-crosslinked collagen follows the random nucleation and growth process at conversion values lower than 0.5. When the conversion is higher than 0.5, the mechanism tends to random scission model. For low-crosslinked collagen, the degradation is mainly governed by random nucleation and nuclei growth. The gaseous products of VLF thermal degradation were analyzed with an online-coupled TG-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy system. Graphical abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.]. © 2019, The Author(s).