(335p) Green Technical Routes and Clean Productions for Diene-Based High Performance Elatomers

Green technical routes and clean productions for diene-based high performance elatomers

Qinmin Pan¹, Zhijun Zhou², Garry L. Rempel³

¹Green Polymer and Catalysis Laboratory, Soochow University, Suzhou 215123, PR China; ²Department of Chemical and biological Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, PR China; ³Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1, Canada

This work is focused on investigating a green polymerization and hydrogenation route for the synthesis of hydrogenation nitrile butadiene rubber (HNBR), which is a very important high performance elastomer and widely used in automobile and petrochemical industry.

The current commercial process of HNBR starts with emulsion polymerization followed by solution hydrogenation. Thus complicated pretreatment and post-treatment are involved, and the process has not been optimized in terms of the energy cost and material cost, and the environmental impact is not yet minimized. In our current work, we successfully realized the hydrogenation of NBR directly in the latex form, and thus the use of the organic solvents that are required in the traditional process are eliminated, and the polymerization and the hydrogenation can be integrated into a single process. Furthermore, we developed a membrane separation process to efficiently separate surfactants and purify the waste water so that they can be recycled and reused at the start points. A hydrogenation degree higher than 95% without any crosslinking, which is required for the product to reach the qualification index as high performance elastomer, is relized. 3Rs (reduce, reuse and recycle) are completely achieved without any waste liquid/water to be discharged, i.e. zero discharge.