Flame-Retardancy Improvement Of Novel StyreneYMaleic Anhydride.pdf

Flame-Retardancy Improvement Of Novel StyreneYMaleic Anhydride Based Copolymers Sara Shaghaghi and Ali Reza Mahdavian* Polymer Science Department, Iran Polymer Petrochemical Institute, P. O. Box: 14965/115, Tehran, Iran (*Author for correspondence; Tel.: +9821-4458-0000; Fax: +9821-4458-0023; E-mail: a.mahdavian@ippi.ac.ir) Received 18 February 2006; accepted in revised form 19 April 2006 Key words: flame-retardancy, styrene, maleic anhydride, copolymerization reaction, limiting oxygen index, synergistic effect Abstract Brominated flame-retardants are one of the common and efficient compounds in producing flame retardant plastics and antimony trioxide is often used as a synergistic agent for halogenated flame-retardants. In this research, a new reactive flame retardant, maleated tetrabromobiphenol-A (MTBBA) crystals, has been introduced for the first time and its structure was fully characterized by high-field 1H NMR and 13C NMR spectroscopy. The improvement in flame- retardancy effect of styreneYmaleic anhydride copolymer by MTBBA and also their compounded samples with Sb2O3 was investigated as the main purpose in this work. Limiting oxygen indexes (LOI) for the neat terpolymers and the compounded samples were measured by flammability tests. Also thermal gravimetry analysis (TGA) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) were applied in order to study thermal behavior of the samples. The results of thermal analysis were used to observe the effect of insertion of this novel monomer into the copolymer chain in comparison with styreneYmaleic anhydride copolymer. Introduction Copolymers of styreneYmaleic anhydride (SMA) are preferred by plastics designers, engineers and processors for automotive applications, such as soft instrument panels, structural consoles, roof-mounted LCD video supports, interior trim and audio components [1].1 High flammability similar to other polymers is one of their important defects. In the structure of copolymer there are a lot of carbon