UV-Cured Transparent Silicone Materials with High Tensile Strength Prepared from Hyperbranched Silicon-Containing Polymers and Polyurethane-Acrylates.

Abstract

Flexibility and mechanical performance are essential for transparent silicone materials applied in some optical and electronic devices; however, the tensile strength of transparent silicone materials is fairly low. To overcome this problem, a kind of UV-cured transparent flexible silicone material with quite a high tensile strength and elongation at break was developed through UV-initiated thiol–ene reaction by hyperbranched silicon-containing polymers (HBPs) with a thiol substitute and acrylate-terminated polyurethanes. Unexpectedly, it is found that both the tensile strength and elongation at break of the transparent silicone materials are extraordinarily high, which can reach 3.40 MPa and 270.0%, respectively. The UV-cured materials have good UV resistance ability because their transmittance is still as high as 93.4% (800 nm) even when aged for 40 min in a UV chamber of 10.6 mW cm–2. They exhibit outstanding adhesion to substrates, and the adhesion to a glass slide, wood, and a tin plate is grade 1. The promising results encourage us to further improve the mechanical performance of flexible transparent silicone materials by effective chemical modification strategies with HBPs. An attempt was made to apply the UV-cured materials in a Gel-Pak box and it could be proved that the UV-cured materials may be one of the good candidates for use as packaging or protecting materials of optical or electronics devices such as the Gel-Pak product.