Study On Polyurethane Elastomers Based On Caster Oil-Polyether Polyol

Polyurethane elastomer (PUE) is a kind of polymer materials with general and excellent properties which are between rubbers and plastics. It often be made into diversified products, such as rubber tires, seals and so on, to be widely used in various fields of national economy because of its outstanding resistance to abrasion, resistance to oil, and remaining high elastic characteristics in a wide rang of hardness, etc.Polyurethane elastomer is generally synthetized by oligomer polyols, isocyanates and chain extenders by the step-growth polymerization. Polyether polyol is an important kinds of oligomer polyols. However, polyether polyol which was prepared by the technology of traditional base catalyst had poor mechanical properties for the high single alcohol content and low degree of average faculties. At the same time, the PUE derived from polyether is lower than the PUE derived from polyester owing to the structure of polyether polyol. And the shortcomings limit its application.At present, the double metal catalysts DMC has been used in industrial production of polyether. The PUE have some advantages such as low unsaturation, narrow distribution of molecular weight and low viscosity by prepared polyether polyol with DMC. Meanwhile the property of the PUE is also improved. However, the raw materials used to prepare oligomer polyols all originated from the resources of irreproducible petroleum. In the future, the production cost of oligomer polyols must be increased with the increase of the international oil price.The castor oil-based polyether polyols with high activity, low unsaturation and narrow distribution of molecular weight was synthetized from castor oil, DMC, epoxy propane by a ring-opening polymerization method. A series of PUE were obtained from the castor oil-based polyether polyols. Furthermore, the properties of the PUE were investigated by mechanical properties, hydrolysis resistance, FTIR, DSC, and TGA.FTIR results suggested that the CPUE contained a certain amount of ester group and ester group. DSC results verified that the glass transition temperature of the CPUE derived from castor oil-based polyether decreased with the decrease of the mass ratio of N220and Castor. The performance of high resistance was studied by TGA. It was demonstrated that the hardness and strength of CPUE increased with the content of-NCO group in pre-polymer. But the elongation decreased. Besides, the low mass ratio of N220and Castor oil-based polyether can improve the hydrolysis resistance of CPUE.