Isothermal kinetics and thermal degradation of an aryl azo dye-containing polynorbornene

The kinetics involved in the thermal degradation of an aryl azo dye-containing polynorbornene was investigated by using isothermal DSC data. The activation energy of the degradation was found to be temperature dependent with two different values of 140 ± 5 and 21 ± 2 kJ mol−1, and the Avrami exponent was observed to increase from 2 to 4 in the temperature range 573–608 K. The degradation mechanism follows the Avrami–Erofeev mechanism for solid state reaction models and it changes from A2 toward A4 for the same temperature range.