High Performance Oil Resistant Rubber

Abstract

Blending of polymers has gained much interest due to the fact that, it can be used to produce new polymeric materials with specific properties suitable for some special applications. The blends from acrylonitrile butadiene rubber (NBR), chloroprene rubber (CR) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) has been designed for products working in contact with oils. The characteristics of the designed blends either binary blends (NBR/PVC or PVC/CR) or ternary blends (NBR/ PVC/CR) were investigated by rheological properties, mechanical analysis and swelling in oil and toluene. It was found that the incorporation of PVC in the blend compositions leads to the decrease in degree of swelling, the penetration rate and the average diffusion coefficient. On the other hand the ultimate tensile strength (UTS), the hardness and strain energy were increased. This was attributed to the plastic nature of PVC, beside its additional behavior as filler. The crosslinking density in the blend vulcanizates under investigations was determined by Flory-Rehner and Mooney-Rivlin [Stress/Strain] equations. The higher values of crosslinking density determined by Mooney-Rivlin can be attributed to the additional physical crosslinks (e.g. entanglements etc), beside the chemical crosslinks determined by swelling in toluene. This study showed that NBR/PVC blends are characterized with high performance oil resistant, which can be recommended to automotive industry.