Abstract
This article reports preparation of a crosslinked polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) network via dynamic transesterification reaction between PDMS-diglycidyl ether and pripol 1017 with Zn(OAc)2 as the catalyst. The thermal dynamic nature of the network was investigated by the creep-recovery and stress-relaxation tests. The synthesized PDMS elastomer showed excellent solvent resistance even under high temperature, and could be reprocessed by hot pressing at 180 °C with the mechanical properties maintained after 10 cycles. Application of the PDMS elastomer in constructing micro-patterned stamps repeatedly has been demonstrated. The high plastic temperature and good solvent resistance distinguish the research from other reported thermoplastic PDMS elastomers and broaden the practical application areas.
Highlights
Recycling polymers can be achieved through noncovalent bonds and reversible dissociation of chemical reactions, the materials based on these interactions will lose their structural integrity under heating because of the insufficient crosslinks density[11,12,13]
Crosslinked PDMS network was obtained from the reaction between PDMS-diglycidyl ether and pripol 1017 catalyzed by Zn(OAc)[2]
The crosslinking process completed after 12-hour at 130 °C, which was confirmed by the disappearance of typical epoxy ethyl peak (911 cm−1), the blue shift of acid peak (1710 cm−1) to ester peak (1740 cm−1) and the appearance of hydroxyl absorption peak at 3474 cm−1 in Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectra, and the increasing proton peaks of epoxy ethyl from 2.5–3.2 to 3.9–4.3 ppm in 1H NMR results
Summary
Recycling polymers can be achieved through noncovalent bonds and reversible dissociation of chemical reactions, the materials based on these interactions will lose their structural integrity under heating because of the insufficient crosslinks density[11,12,13]. Different from polymers crosslinked by noncovalent bonds and reversible dissociation of chemical reactions, the dynamic property of the network based on associative exchangeable covalent interactions is shown by the topology changing while the number of crosslinks keeps constant both in inter- and intra-molecular polymer chains. Thermoplastic silicone elastomers created by employing dynamic chemistry have been reported[44,45,46,47,48,49]. Their plasticizing temperatures were relatively low and could not meet the requirement for practical utilization. The high plastic temperature will broaden the scope of applications of the thermoplastic silicone elastomers
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