María Teresa García, Ignacio Gracia, Gema Duque, Antonio de Lucas, Juan Francisco Rodríguez paper: "Study of the solubility and stability of polystyrene wastes in a dissolution recycling process", Waste Management 29 (2009) 1814–1818).
María Teresa García, Ignacio Gracia, Gema Duque, Antonio de Lucas, Juan Francisco Rodríguez paper: "Study of the solubility and stability of polystyrene wastes in a dissolution recycling process", Waste Management 29 (2009) 1814–1818).
I have used dichloroethane to very good effect (only because it was near at hand); I would expect that most chlorinated solvents would be very effective.
In the polymer chemistry practical, which I taught long time ago in England, the students carry out solution polymerization of styrene in toluene. The polystyrene remains dissolved in toluene until a nonsolvent (such as methanol) is added in excess in order to precipitate the polymer.
Maybe the keyword "hanson parameter" will help.. something like this: http://www.chem.pku.edu.cn/page/liangdh/data/SOLVENT%20SELECTION%20BASED%20ON%20HANSON%20SOLUBILITY%20PARAMETERS.pdf
ps: everything is possible at room temperature, if your solvent is good enough
I glanced at the representative papers from the your department & Institution, so the reagents suggested by others are applicable. I do not know the MW of coffee cups ie
"Styrofoam" but they dissolve quite well in gasoline, which is probably quite cost effective.
chloroform is a good solvent. I think that mw 350000 is soluble in choloroform as PS at different molecular weight is used as standard in GPC. A temperature close to room temperature is ok.
Do you have experience in solvent mixture (Ethylene acetate, cychloheptane and methyl cyclohexane)? How rate between them to get best solvent for Chloroprene rubber?