Deciphering van der Waals interaction between polypropylene and carbonated fly ash from experimental and molecular simulation.

Pollution emitted from power plants, including a considerable amount of fly ash (FA) and carbon dioxide (CO), annually increases and is challenging from an environmentally friendly and sustainable point of view. To date, laboratory-scaled approaches cannot efficiently replace the FA-landfilling and mitigate the stress from CO emission. Here, a practically operatable fundamental work by combining carbonated FA (C-FA)-immobilizing CO in FA-and polypropylene (PP) matrix is reported and reveals abnormal mechanical and thermal features clarified by calculating van der Waals (vdW) interaction from an atomic scale.