Polyethylene as a polymeric precursor for carbon fibre production has attracted much attention over recent years. Not only is it a low-cost commodity polymer, it has a higher theoretical carbon yield (at 86%) than polyacrylonitrile (at 67%) and is very readily melt processed into fibres. The challenge is to efficiently dehydrogenate and graphitize polyethylene fibres. This paper explores the use of bromine as a novel oxidant to functionalise polyethylene prior to carbonisation, leading to efficient cyclisation and carbonisation on heating. Through a process of low-temperature photo-induced liquid-phase bromination followed by dehydrobromination at moderate temperature and subsequent carbonisation to 800 °C, a carbonaceous product was obtained in high yield (>90%). The effects of a range of process conditions, as well as the use of different types of polyethylene and polyethylene blends, were explored.

近年来，聚乙烯作为用于碳纤维生产的聚合物前体引起了广泛的关注。它不仅是一种低成本的商品聚合物，而且具有比聚丙烯腈（67％）更高的理论碳收率（86％），并且非常容易熔融加工成纤维。挑战在于如何有效地使聚乙烯纤维脱氢和石墨化。本文探讨了在碳化之前使用溴作为新型氧化剂对聚乙烯进行官能化的方法，从而在加热时实现有效的环化和碳化。通过低温光诱导液相溴化，然后在中等温度下进行脱氢溴化，随后碳化至800°C，可以高收率（> 90％）获得含碳产物。一系列工艺条件的影响，