Affiliation: | 1. Université de Haute-Alsace, CNRS, IS2M UMR7361, Mulhouse, F-68100 France Université de Strasbourg, France EDST, Université Libanaise, Campus Hariri, Hadath, Beirut, Lebanon;2. Université de Haute-Alsace, CNRS, IS2M UMR7361, Mulhouse, F-68100 France Université de Strasbourg, France;3. BASF SE, D-67056 Ludwigshafen, Germany;4. BASF Polyurethane GmbH, D-49448 Lemförde, Germany;5. Université de Haute-Alsace, CNRS, IS2M UMR7361, Mulhouse, F-68100 France |
Abstract: | Frontal polymerization (FP) has attracted increasing interest in recent years in various applications. This polymerization method can be very promising for the polymerization of thick materials with high fillers content in the range of 50–80% (weight) by local application of a reasonable amount of energy. In this work, recent advances in controllable and predictive behavior for photoinduced frontal photopolymerization are reported. Here, tert-butyl peroxybenzoate (Luperox-P) is selected to initiate thermal polymerization at depth because its high polymerization ability and its decomposition temperature is in a promising range, i.e., neither extremely high (monomer decomposition) nor very low (storage stability issues). Thermal imaging experiments are used to follow the temperatures in the samples in real time. The number of cured layers and the depth of cure are also determined. This paper investigates various factors such as the contents of both photo and thermal initiators, the light intensity, the fiber contents, the irradiation time, etc., resulting in a statistical design of experiments with the factors: 1) content of Luperox P and 2) the irradiation time used to investigate the influence on photoinduced frontal polymerization. Markedly, FP appears to be fully controllable for a storage-stable, tunable 1K system. |