Epoxies Modified by Palmitic Acid: from Hot Melt Adhesives to Plasticized Networks

C.E. HOPPE; M.J. GALANTE; P.A. OYANGUREN; R.J.J. WILLIAMS

Brujas (Bélgica)

Simposio; 8th European Symposium on Polymer Blends - Eurofillers 2005; 2005

The motivation of this study was to investigate the possibility of synthesizing amphiphilic epoxy networks using formulations based on a fatty acid, an excess of a conventional epoxy monomer based on diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A (DGEBA), and a tertiary amine as a catalyst of the epoxy-acid reaction and as initiator of the homopolymerization of the epoxy excess. If fatty ester units remain molecularly dispersed in the epoxy network, this would lead to a plasticization effect together with an increase in the hydrophobic character of the resulting material. However, crystallization of fatty ester chains might take place in a cooling step leading to a change in the physical, thermal and mechanical properties of the generated materials. Particular formulations based on palmitic acid (PA) and DGEBA will be analyzed in this paper. By varying the initial molar ratio of epoxy to carboxyl groups it will be shown that either hot melt adhesives or plasticized epoxy networks exhibiting a broad range of variation of their glass transition temperature, can be obtained.