Liquid Resin Processes

Phenolic resin molding compounds can also be processed as resins using liquid resin processing methods. 

Liquid resins are usually reinforced with fibers (glass, asbestos), because of their brittleness. They are almost always used for process plant construction. As liquid resins they can be catalyzed to cure at room temperature and low pressures. Relatively cheap wooden molds are required to build quite large items such as tanks and ducting on a one-off basis. The principal materials in this group of plastics are described below. 

Process in whicli continuous strands of roving or roving tape are wound, at a specified pitch and tension, onto the outside surface of a mandrel. Roving is saturated with liquid resin or is preimpregnated with partially cured resin. Application of heat may be required to promote polymerization. 

In the liquid-phase process, high pressures in the range of 80-100 atmospheres are used. A sulfonated polystyrene cation exchange resin is the catalyst commonly used at about 150°C. An isopropanol yield of 93.5% can be realized at 75% propylene conversion. The only important byproduct is diisopropyl ether (about 5%). Figure 8-4 is a flow diagram of the propylene hydration process. ... 

Current state-of-the-art technology for the production of MIBK involves one-step liquid phase processes in trickle bed reactors at 100-160°C and 1 to 10 MPa utilizing various multifunctional catalysts including Pd, Pt, Ni or Cu supported on, metal oxides, cation exchange resins, modified ZSM5 and other zeolites with lull energy integration (2,3,4). However, the MIBK... 

UV-radiation curing has become a well-accepted technology which has found numerous industrial applications because of its distinct advantages 1-3. One of its main characteristics is the rapidity of the process which transforms quasi-instantly the liquid resin into a solid polymer under intense illumination by a UV-source or a laser beam4. The polymerization rate can be finely controlled by acting on the initiation rate through the intensity of the UV radiation. It is... 

Table 2.17 analyses some examples of the relative processing cost versus the annual production in units. The various technologies listed are not suitable for all materials or parts machining is used with numerous materials rotational moulding uses liquid resins vacuum forming uses thermoplastic sheets blow moulding uses special grades of thermoplastics... 

There has been an enormous technological interest in tertfa/j-butanol (tBA) dehydration during the past thirty years, first as a primary route to methyl te/f-butyl ether (MTBE) (1) and more recently for the production of isooctane and polyisobutylene (2). A number of commercializable processes have been developed for isobutylene manufacture (eq 1) in both the USA and Japan (3,4). These processes typically involve either vapor-phase tBA dehydration over a silica-alumina catalyst at 260-370°C, or liquid-phase processing utilizing either homogenous (sulfonic acid), or solid acid catalysis (e.g. acidic cationic resins). More recently, tBA dehydration has been examined using silica-supported heteropoly acids (5), montmorillonite clays (6), titanosilicates (7), as well as the use of compressed liquid water (8). 

Injected pultrusion is a process in which fiber preforms are pulled through a mold where the liquid resin is injected into the fibers and then heated until the desired degree of cure in the... 

The rate of bleeding is dependent on several factors, including the permeability of the fiber bed, both vertically and horizontally, and the viscosity of the liquid resin. The permeability of the fiber bed will depend on the weave of the fabric, the fiber diameter, and the fiber volume fraction. The resin viscosity is determined by the chemistry of the resin and the thermal profile of the cure cycle. The cure cycle greatly affects resin viscosity and the flow process, both directly through the pressure application and indirectly through the effect of the thermal profile on resin viscosity. 

The cure of thermoset resins involves the transformation of a liquid resin, first with an increase in viscosity to a gel state (rubber consistency), and finally to a hard solid. In chemical terms, the liquid is a mixture of molecules that reacts and successively forms a solid network polymer. In practice the resin is catalyzed and mixed before it is injected into the mold thus, the curing process will be initialized at this point. The resin cure must therefore proceed in such a way that the curing reaction is slow or inhibited in a time period that is dictated by the mold fill time plus a safety factor otherwise, the increase in viscosity will reduce the resin flow rate and prevent a successful mold fill. On completion of the mold filling the rate of cure should ideally accelerate and reach a complete cure in a short time period. There are limitations, however, on how fast the curing can proceed set by the resin itself, and by heat transfer rates to and from the composite part. 

In recent years, proprietary catalysts lor advancement have been incorporated in precatalyzed liquid resins. Thus only the addition of bisphenol A is needed to produce solid epoxy resins. Use of the catalysis is claimed to provide resins free from branching which can occur in conventional fusion processes. Additionally, use of the catalysts results in rapid chain-extension reactions because of the high amount of heal generated in the processing. 

Microfabrication by means of laser radiation covers a wide range of different methods (24,25). On the one hand, these are processes where material is removed in an intense electromagnetic field by melting, evaporation, decomposition, photoablation, or a combination of these phenomena. On the other hand, generating processes exist where structures are built up from liquid resins, laminated layers, or powders using, e.g., photochemically induced crosslinking of organic compounds... 

The pioneer work in this field was carried out on polystyrene-supported acid catalysts [161]. Thereafter, several works on the use of sulfonic, strong acidic cation exchangers as acid catalysts were reported for alkylation, hydration, etherification, esterification, cleavage of ether bonds, dehydration, and aldol condensation [162,168-171], Besides, industrial applications of these materials were evaluated with reactions related to the chemistry of alkenes, that is, alkylation, isomerization, oligomerization, and acylation. [163,169], Also, Nation, an acid resin which has an acid strength equivalent to concentrated sulfuric acid, can be applied as an acid catalyst. It is used for the alkylation of aromatics with olefins in the liquid or gas phases and other reactions however, due to its low surface area, the Nation resin has relatively low catalytic activity in gas-phase reactions or liquid-phase processes where a nonpolar reactant or solvent is employed [166],... 

Impregnation. Apart from the release sheets all the raw material papers described above are required to be impregnated with a liquid resin—either melamine-formaldehyde for the surfaces or phenol-formaldehyde for the core. This stage of the process, essentially, involves filling the paper with the appropriate amount of the liquid resin, driving off solvents, and advancing the cure until a handleable sheet of semi-cured impregnated paper is obtained. 

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