The migration of plasticizer from a product can restrict the usability of the product as this process affects material properties and shorten their service life. The objective of the present study is to investigate this migration process and observe its dynamics under short‐term thermal aging. For this purpose, in situ FTIR‐ATR spectra are recorded after every hour for continuous 60 h, while the plasticized and unplasticized NBR system is mounted and heated on ATR crystal with a heating plate at 70 °C. The band ratio of the corresponding characteristic peak areas from plasticizer carbonyl (1736 cm−1) and reference C‐H stretching from butadiene (968 cm−1) is determined after every hour. TGA analysis carried out on similar NBR samples with gradually increasing plasticizer amounts helped to obtain the calibration curve which is used to determine the migrated plasticizer amount. With the obtained data, it is possible to determine the diffusion coefficient and to quantify the migrated plasticizer amount during short‐term thermal aging and thus present a universal tool for the comparison of different plasticizers with respect to their migration behavior.

The increasing environmental and toxic health concerns due to phthalate-based plasticizers are pushing researchers to eliminate these market leader plasticizers and to find nature-friendly bio-based plasticizers with reduced migration. The present study is also an effort in this regard. Herein, the epoxidized monoester of glycerol formal based on soybean oil is synthetically modified by carbonation in the presence of a catalyst to increase the polarity of the plasticizer. These modified and pristine plasticizers were incorporated in acrylonitrile─butadiene rubber and their migration analysis during heating the sample for 60 h were performed using fourier transform infrared spectroscopy with attenuated total reflectance (FTIR-ATR) by observing the absorbance of the characteristic carbonyl stretching vibration peak (1736 cm À1 ) of plasticizer relative to the C H stretching vibration of butadiene (968 cm À1 ). The results of migration kinetics and mechanical testing demonstrated reduction of diffusion coefficients by modification while hardness and tensile strength are hardly affected. In addition to the fact that soybean oil as a natural resource is more sustainable, the additional synthesis step of binding CO 2 is advantageous for a green chemistry approach.

The present work describes the use of dielectric analysis (DEA) for comparison of swelling kinetics of two polyurethane coating recipes, R1702 and R1703, with varied hardener amount by swelling in ethanol. For this purpose, a rapid swelling test, simulating a cleaning process of coated polymer housings, was created and the diffusion coefficients of different coating compositions were calculated. These diffusion coefficients were compared with diffusion coefficients determined from the classical swelling experiment. Besides this, the internal comparison of swelling kinetics after repeated exposure of coatings to ethanol was made. Subsequently, the coating compositions with the most resistant against swelling were determined. For the fitting of desorption curves, received from DEA measurements, a fit function based on the solution of the second Fick´s law and Doolittle like equation was used. The DEA can be successfully used for comparison of desorption processes in polyurethane coatings and for the calculation of diffusion coefficients.

Migration of epoxidized monoester plasticizers based on bio‐oil can be reduced by adopting a green strategy of incorporating CO2 into the epoxy rings of the plasticizer. In the present work, three different approaches are evaluated to optimize reaction output and the time required to complete the cycloaddition of CO2 in epoxidized monoester of soybean oil with glycerol formal. In the first approach, deep eutectic solvent (DES) is utilized along with conventionally used tetrabutylammonium bromide (TBAB) catalyst to analyze the effect of DES on reaction, while in the second approach a co‐catalyst system along with onium halide is employed. In the third strategy, a simple catalyst system comprising potassium iodide (KI) and polyethylene glycol with a molecular weight of 400 (PEG 400) or 18‐crown ether as phase transfer catalysts is investigated. In all three approaches, experimental parameters such as temperature, pressure, stirring rate, time, catalyst type, and catalyst concentration are systematically evaluated. TBAB catalyst along with equimolar (DES) under 40 bars pressure demonstrated the best conversion of epoxy groups to five‐membered cyclic carbonated rings within 4 h. Fourier transform Infrared spectroscopic (FTIR) analyses are regularly performed to monitor reaction progress while nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopic (NMR) analysis is performed to confirm purity of the final product.