Custom pyrolyzer for the pyrolysis of chemical warfare agents

•A custom pyrolyzer was designed and built for the study of toxic compounds.•Studies were conducted using a Chemical Warfare Agent simulant, Triethyl Phosphate.•The activation energy of Triethyl Phosphate was determined to be 32.0 ± 7.6 kcal/mol. Thermal decomposition studies on a chemical warfare agent (CWA) simulant was performed using a custom built pyrolyzer. The goals of this study were to design, build and evaluate a simple pyrolyzer to meet the safety and security requirements necessary to obtain consistent CWA and CWA simulant pyrolysis data from multiple laboratories around the world. A custom made tubular flow reactor was built, the pyrolysis effluent was collected on solid sorbent tubes, and was analyzed by thermal desorption (TD) gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS). Experiments were conducted with triethyl phosphate (TEP), a well-studied CWA simulant, to determine the activation energy (Ea) and rate constant (k) for the unimolecular decomposition of TEP under the designed experimental conditions and to validate pyrolyzer performance. Experiments with TEP were conducted at five different temperatures (375–440 °C) with samples collected at five flow rates. The activation energy for TEP decomposition was determined to be 32.0 ± 7.6 kcal/mol which is consistent with previous reported literature data.