SYNTHESIS AND CHARACTERIZATION OF RIGID POLYURETHANE FOAM WITH DIFFERENT FORMULATIONS OF BLOWING AGENT”

Abstract

Polyurethanes are the most important class of materials and their demand as an excellent performance industrial material is consistently growing. The broad applications of polyurethane includes as material for packaging; furniture; thermal insulation of buildings, refrigerators, deep freeze equipment, pipelines and storage tanks; buoyancy aids in boats and flotation equipment etc. The research and development of all kinds of domestic as well as international in polyurethane material industry have been revealed that the current situation of the polyurethane industry in the developing direction. Importance to understanding the chemistry and structural element that improve the thermal stability, mechanical strength, flame retardancy and biodegradability as these are important perquisites to obtain a high performance material for increasing applications. The scientific interest in using bio-based polyols in the manufacture of polyurethane products has increased significantly in recent years. In the present project rigid polyurethane foams have been prepared from natural oil like castor oil modified by glycerol and 4, 4-diphenylmethane diisocyanates. Castor oil was characterized in terms of moisture content, hydroxyl value, specific gravity, acid value, moisture contents and solid content. The results are within the range reported in literature. The studies had been carried out for different formulations of blowing agents on Castor oil based rigid polyurethane foams. For this purpose blowing agents used were n-Pentane and Water. The prepared rigid PU foams have characterized by using some sophisticated methods like FTIR, SEM, XRD, TGA, DSC, mechanical properties, flammability testing and biodegradability testing. The resulted castor oil based rigid polyurethane foams, due to their high strength and load bearing capacity are found suitable to replace petrochemical based Polyurethane Foam in commercial applications. It has been found that the foam with 10% concentration of n-Pentane as blowing agent was found to be best among all other formulations in its properties and structure. The foam obtained was found to be biodegradable to good extent.