On the kinetic processing of thermal analysis data

The isoconversional methods (Friedman and Flynn-Wall-Ozawa) as well as the invariant kinetic parameter method (IKP) were applied to discriminate the kinetic model and to determine the kinetic parameters for simulated non-isothermal data. It was shown that the activation energy value that results from the application of the IKP method is in good agreement with that obtained by means of isoconversional methods, and the values of f(alpha) calculated by means of the IKP method are proportional to the true f(alpha), characteristic for the mechanism of the investigated change. The analysis of the results presented in this paper suggests the necessity to record the alpha = alpha(T) curves for several heating rates in order to achieve a correct evaluation of the non-isothermal kinetic parameters.