Microwave pyrolysis advantages

The advantage of microwave pyrolysis over conventional pyrolysis methods do not rely on changes in chemical pathways, but in the advantages that have been mentioned previously. 

Mixing carbon with microwave-transparent materials, particularly plastics, and subjecting the mix to microwave radiation, is a very efficient way to heat up such materials, increasing their bulk temperature to a point where pyrolysis occurs. In this chapter the main characteristics of a number of microwave pyrolysis processes, for plastics and other materials, have been introduced, showing that these processes combine the advantages of microwave heating with the commercial and environmental opportunities intrinsic to the pyrolysis of wastes. 

Recently, carbon NPs with ECL activity have been prepared by an electrochemical method [101] as well as through a facile and economical microwave pyrolysis approach [108]. On heating, a saccharide and surfactant PEG-200 mixture solution in a 500 W microwave oven for 2-10 min, the colorless solution was transformed to yellow and finally to dark brown, which entails the formation of carbon NPs. This case represents a convenient and low-cost method which decreases the reaction time and devotes a potential advancement to large-scale industrialization. It s highly sensitive analytical applications emerged by the advantages of convenience, low cost, and effectiveness of the method. 

Another advantage of this process is its high flexibility. Indeed, the composition, structure (amorphous or crystalline), microstructure, and properties of the ceramic material can be controlled and adjusted by varying many different parameters such as the composition and architecture of the pre-ceramic polymer, the amount and nature of the filler, the cross-linking step, and the pyrolysis parameters (atmosphere, heating rate, final temperature). Also, nonconventional heating systems such as laser or microwave heating or even athermal conversion processes like ion bombardment can be efficiently used. 

Ion attachment mass spectrometry (lAMS) has proven to be a rMque method that complements electron-impact ionization mass spectrometry for the determination of components in chemical processes and environments, such as microwave discharge plasma. The identification of intermediate free radicals and other species in chemical reactions is particularly challenging. One of the greatest advantages of lAMS is that it can be used to directly analyze gaseous compounds. The features that allow this system to detect the intermediate free radicals (refer to Sect. 5.2.4) and novel molecular species produced in various plasmas have been extensively explored (Sect. 5.2.7), and lAMS techniques can be used to identify and quantify compounds and mixtures under plasma and pyrolysis (Sect. 6.4) conditions. To extend the ion attachment technique to ion trap mass spectrometry (Sect. 6.5) or time-of-flight mass spectrometry (Sect. 6.6) has been realized. 

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