Construction of ternary mixture of long-chain acrylates for lower-temperature and higher-effect rotator phase photopolymerization

Abstract

Low-temperature rotator phase photopolymerization is meeting great challenges due to the polymerization can’t occur after the rotator phase transform into crystalline phase, thus lower transition temperature between these two phases (TC-R) is needed. In this work, ternary mixture of hexadecyl acrylate (HDA), tetradecyl acrylate (TDA) and dodecyl acrylate (DDA) was constructed by drawing on the experiences of previous binary mixtures. Since the advantages of each component were combined, the mixture was proved possessing stable rotator phase, and the TC-R of the mixture achieved −38.11℃, which was 9.14℃ lower than the previous binary mixtures of octadecyl acrylate (ODA) and TDA. The photopolymerization kinetic of ternary mixture was investigated, which showed efficient photopolymerization at −30℃, moreover, the conversions between −25℃∼-15℃ were 6 %∼12 % higher than those of the binary mixture of ODA/TDA. In addition, it was found that the rotator phase photopolymerization of ternary mixture showed the properties similar to living polymerization, which performed post polymerization to realize complete conversion of monomers. Meanwhile, the feature of post polymerization demonstrated that besides TC-R, the spatial distance between adjacent monomers also significantly affect the conversion in rotator phase.