Application of the NPK Method in the Crystallization Kinetics of High-Density Polyethylene

Abstract

The Non-Parametric Kinetics (NPK) method, developed in 1998, by Serra, R., Sempere, J. and Nomen, R. has been used by them and other research groups to analyze the thermal behavior of a physical or chemical transformation and thermal stability. However, it was until 2021 that the method was applied for the first time in a cooling process for the determination of the crystallization kinetics of polypropylene, obtaining satisfactory results. The advantage of the NPK method is that it does not assume any model for the temperature function, nor for the conversion function to describe the crystallization kinetics. Through a mathematical process, the method provides two vectors: the vector u, which contains the information about the kinetic model, and the vector v, which contains the information about the temperature function. The aim of this work is to verify that the NPK method is applicable to the crystallization of high-density polyethylene by comparing the results with the most commonly used models to describe the crystallization kinetics of polymers. The fits obtained were very good and the vector u and v allow us to reproduce the original curves from DSC.