Designers of automotive, agricultural and construction vehicles all share a common desire to move towards material with molded in color (MIC). Some of the benefits of MIC resins are: Lower volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from painting or coating, less rejects as compared with the painting/coating of complex parts and lower systems costs. For interior parts or parts with lower exposure to UV light, MIC resins have already displaced many of the painted applications. For exterior applications, materials are needed with an excellent balance of UV stability, processability and mechanical properties over the lifetime of the vehicle. Also to be commercially viable, the resin needs, among other attributes, to be manufacturable and available from low cost raw materials. Polycarbonate (PC) resins have an excellent balance of processability and mechanical properties. Uncoated PC will not withstand the long term weatherability required for these applications. To overcome these short comings of PC, we have sought to copolymerize a latent UV absorber into the polymer backbone. To this end, aromatic polyesters were incorporated into the polymers (Figure 1): these units undergo a photo Fries rearrangement when exposed to UV light (Figure 2). The photo Fries products, o-hydroxybenzophenones, are a known class of UV absorbers. This paper will discuss the selection, synthesis and properties of these resins with latent UV absorbers.

Synthesis and properties of polyarylate block copolymers for weatherable transportation applications

246th National Meeting (2013)

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