Microplastic Photooxidative Fragmentation

Plastic debris in the environment doesn't crumble from mechanical wear alone — sunlight chemically attacks it. This simulator renders a microplastic particle as a network of bonded polymer units and exposes it to a live UV photon stream. Each absorbed photon carries a chance, set by an Arrhenius rate constant, of triggering chain scission — snapping a bond in the backbone. As scissions accumulate, the network's average molecular weight falls and clusters mechanically detach, drifting away as new, smaller secondary-microplastic fragments that keep degrading on their own. UV intensity, ambient temperature and dissolved-oxygen availability sliders let you see why plastic on a hot, sunlit, oxygenated beach degrades in years while the same plastic buried in cold, anoxic sediment can persist for centuries.