Pyrolysis-GC/MS and TGA as Tools for Characterizing Blends of SBR and NBR

Abstract

There is increased technological interest to use blends of various dissimilar elastomers in applications for which service, material availability, or cost of a single elastomer do not provide the necessary processing, vulcanizate, or economic properties. Properties of polyblends are sensitive to variations in the amounts of the individual polymers used. Therefore, there is a need for developing a variety of analytical tools that will enable the compounder to monitor the consistency of blend compositions. In this study, the feasibility of using pyrolysis-GC/MS and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) to estimate the blend composition of SBR/NBR blends was investigated. Pyrolysis-GC/MS degradation products that are characteristic of each polymer were identified. The GC/MS peak areas were used to determine the blend composition. The blend compositions were estimated by TGA from the linear correlation between the polymer composition and the temperature required to pyrolyze a sample to a specific “% weight loss.” The results obtained by pyrolysis-GC/MS and TGA were compared to calculated blend ratios of SBR/NBR in order to estimate the accuracy of the test methods presented in this study.

Quantitative analysis of unknown compositions in ternary polymer blends: A model study on NR/SBR/BR system

“…Shield and Ghebremeskel [18,19] showed that the temperature that corresponds to 70% weight loss of the original sample weight (T 70% ) correlated with the styrene content in SBR. In this study, the temperature that corresponds to T 70% was used in NR/SBR, NR/BR and SBR/BR blends.…”

“…It converts the weight % at an initial temperature into 100% and the weight % at 550 8C (all polymers are pyrolyzed) into 0%, to exclude the weight effect of carbon black and filler which exists inside the sample [18].…”

“…The thermal degradation behavior of a blend has been used to identify SBR/BR blends from SBR based compounds by Amraee et al [17] using the ratio of the peak height of a DTG peak. Shield and Ghebremskel [18] utilized the temperature that corresponds to 70% weight loss of original sample weight (T 70% ) to correlate with the styrene content in SBR. Using same methods, Shield and Ghebremeskel [19] investigated the SBR content in SBR/ NBR blends.…”

“…Shield and Ghebremskel [18] utilized the temperature that corresponds to 70% weight loss of original sample weight (T 70% ) to correlate with the styrene content in SBR. Using same methods, Shield and Ghebremeskel [19] investigated the SBR content in SBR/ NBR blends.…”

Rapid and nondestructive quantitative analysis of natural rubber blends regardless of geographical origin and harvest time of the natural rubber

“…To this end, a variety of analytical protocols have been developed to monitor rubber blend composition, such as TGA, [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] Py-GC/MS, 8,9,17,18 FTIR, 8,12,19 and ATR-FTIR. 6 However, sample preparation and testing are usually sophisticated and timeconsuming, and the samples are destroyed through the testing in most of these methods, excluding the test by ATR-FTIR.…”