Computational aspects of kinetic analysis. Part B: The ICTAC Kinetics Project - the decomposition kinetics of calcium carbonate revisited, or some tips on survival in the kinetic minefield

This paper is Part B (PartA, M.E. Brown, et al., Thermochim. Acta, Special Issue Toward the New Century) of a series of papers that present and discuss the results of the ICTAC Kinetic Analysis Project. This part discusses the results which participants in the project have obtained from the isothermal and non-isothermal data provided on the thermal decomposition of calcium carbonate in nitrogen and in vacuum. The data demonstrate that the kinetic description of the process depends strongly on the experimental conditions. The very limited applicability of the kinetic methods that use single-heating rate data is emphasized. To obtain reliable kinetic descriptions, one should use computational methods that employ multi-heating rate data and allow for treating multi-step processes. The importance of evaluating full kinetic triplets is illustrated for several cases when knowledge of the activation energy alone does not permit adequate interpretation of kinetic data. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.