Degradation and stability studies of butadiene rubber: Correlation between experimental and computational values

Abstract

Butadiene rubber (BR) is the second highest consuming synthetic elastomer after styrene butadiene rubber. It contains one double bond from each monomer unit in the polymeric backbone prone to oxidation and degradation process. The present study deals with oxidative stability study of BR with different type of antioxidants. Effect of concentrations of antioxidant is studied on degradation of BR by monitoring the stability through change in Mooney viscosity and color index. These exposed samples are characterized by FTIR and TGA to understand the polymer degradation behavior. The difference in Mooney viscosity vs antioxidant concentration of various experimental runs and their measured color levels are modeled successfully by data science models. A Random Forest model was used to model changes to Mooney Viscosity and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification model was used to model measured color levels as a function of experimental parameters such as antioxidant concentrations, temperature, and ageing time of samples. The model for Mooney Viscosity was further verified successfully by additional experiments which validated the model predictions.