In recent decades, a fast growing branch in the field of polymers has attracted the attention of the public and safety industry due to its promising results. Interpenetrated polymer networks (IPN), which are a blend of polymers, seek to combine the best properties of two or more different polymer networks in order to achieve a material with better properties compare to their not-interpenetrated counterparts. There has been an increasing interest in developing IPNs in which the two networks are chemically cross-linked. These chemically cross-linked IPNs also known as graft-IPNs, possess remarkable mechanical properties. The enhancement in their mechanical properties can be attributed to the cross-linking of the networks.            The graft-IPNs synthesized consisted of a copolymer and polyurethane phase. The copolymer phase was synthetized using methyl methacrylate (MMA) with the inclusion of the vinyl ester, bisphenol A-glycidyl methacrylate (BisGMA), and the polyurethane phase was synthetized using two dyols: 1,1,1-tris(hydroxymethyl) propane (TRIOL) and poly(tetramethylene ether) glycol (PTMG) average Mn ~ 650 g mol-1.         To obtain information about the mechanical properties of the graft-IPNs, a three-point dynamic mechanical analysis was preformed. The transparency of the samples was measured by UV-visible spectrophotometry. The results showed transmittance values between 75 and 85%. As for the dynamic mechanical analysis, the variable that had the biggest influence in the material final mechanical properties (storage modulus, E�, and tan d) was found to be the variation of the copolymer to polyurethane ratio.

Sequential graft-interpenetrating polymer networks of polyurethane and acrylic/vinyl ester based copolymers

247th National Meeting (2014)

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