Heating, thermal treatments

Heating, often up to high or very high temperatures, is a common procedure needed for melting or speeding up a reaction between solid or liquid components. 

It is also necessary for a number of heat treatments (annealing, quenching, etc.) which have possibly to be defined according to the aspect of the phase diagram of the materials involved. A variety of methods and instruments are used in order to achieve and control the selected temperatures. A selection of these will be presented in the following, either directly or through their applications. 

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Thermal treatment of meat products ensures microbial destruction of microorganisms but also the denaturation of structural proteins, forming a gelled structure, and the inactivation of many endogenous enzymes (see Figure 21.3 above). In precooked products, characteristic color and flavor of the product are also developed during heating. Thermal treatment can be performed in forced convection ovens, both in... 

In general, the desorptive behavior of contaminated soils and soHds is so variable that the requited thermal treatment conditions are difficult to specify without experimental measurements. Experiments are most easily performed in bench- and pilot-scale faciUties. Full-scale behavior can then be predicted using mathematical models of heat transfer, mass transfer, and chemical kinetics. 

Coal Char This type of char is the nonagglomerated, nonfusible residue from the thermal treatment of coal. Coal chars are obtained as a residue or a coproduct from low-temperature carbonization processes and from processes being developed to convert coal to hquid and gaseous fuels and to chemicals. Such chars have a substantial heating value. The net amount of char from a conversion process varies widely in some instances, it may represent between about 30... 

Thermal treatment and the nature of the casting solvent can also affect the deformation modes achieved in strained films of ionomers. For example, in films cast from polar dimethylformamide (DMF), the solvent interacts with ion-rich clusters and essentially destroys them, as is evident form absence of a second, higher temperature loss peak in such samples. As a result, even in a cast DMF sample of Na-SPS ionomer of high ion content (8.5 mol%), the only deformation mode observed in tensile straining is crazing. However, when these films are given an additional heat treatment (41 h at 210°C), shear... 

Studies of PMMA-based ionomers also demonstrate the influence of thermal treatment on deformation modes (16). For Na salts of PMMA-based ionomers of 6 and 12 mol% that were cast from DMF, only crazes were observed on straining. However, after an additional heat treatment (48 h at 160°C), which also removes any DMF solvent that is present, shear deformation zones are induced. Hence, the ionic cluster phase, which was destroyed by the polar solvent, has been restored by the heat treatment. 

The combined effects of a divalent Ca counterion and thermal treatment can be seen from studies of PMMA-based ionomers [16]. In thin films of Ca-salts of this ionomer cast from methylene chloride, and having an ion content of only 0.8 mol%, the only observed deformation was a series of long, localized crazes, similar to those seen in the PMMA homopolymer. When the ionomer samples were subject to an additional heat treatment (8 h at 100°C), the induced crazes were shorter in length and shear deformation zones were present. This behavior implies that the heat treatment enhanced the formation of ionic aggregates and increased the entanglement strand density. The deformation pattern attained is rather similar to that of Na salts having an ion content of about 6 mol% hence, substitution of divalent Ca for monovalent Na permits comparable deformation modes, including some shear, to be obtained at much lower ion contents. 

There are a number of methods of classifying polymers. One is to adopt the approach of using their response to thermal treatment and to divide them into thermoplastics and thermosets. Thermoplastics are polymers which melt when heated and resolidify when cooled, while thermosets are those which do not melt when heated but, at sufficiently high temperatures, decompose irreversibly. This system has the benefit that there is a useful chemical distinction between the two groups. Thermoplastics comprise essentially linear or lightly branched polymer molecules, while thermosets are substantially crosslinked materials, consisting of an extensive three-dimensional network of covalent chemical bonding. 

Many studies on template thermal degradation have been reported on zeolites of industrial interest including ZSM5 [1-5], silicalite [1], and beta [6-8], as well as surfactant-templated mesostructured materials [9-13]. The latter are structurally more sensitive than molecular sieves. Their structure usually shrinks upon thermal treatment. The general practice is slow heating at 1 °C min (N2/air) up to 550 °C, followed by a temperature plateau. 

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