Obtaining new phthalate plasticizers

Introduction. The increase in production volumes and the expansion of the scope of application of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) compounds contributes to the development of new additives and the attraction of new sources of raw materials for their production. The most important additives necessary for processing PVC are plasticizers. Plasticizers market is one of the largest segments of the global additives market. Since plasticizers are the most simple, cheap and affordable way to modify various properties of the polymeric compositions, their role in processing polymeric materials has recently increased significantly. In application the ester plasticizers, capable to plasticize almost all polymers, especially polyvinylchloride are considered as the most practical. Currently, the industry has mastered production of more than three hundred brands of plasticizers, most of which are esters of phthalic acid. Traditional phthalate plasticizers are the most widely used all over the world. Materials and methods. The paper describes the esterification reactions of phthalic anhydride with oxyethylated (degree of oxyethylation 1.2) and oxypropylated (degree of oxypropelation 1.1) cresols. New symmetric and asymmetric phthalate plasticizers were obtained – dikresoxycresylphthalate, butoxyethylcreoxyethylphthalate, cresylcresoxyethylphthalate and cresylcresoxypropylphthalate, optimum conditions for their preparationare picked up, studied their physical and chemical properties. The obtained experimental data were used to identify promising new phthalate-type plasticizers by the method of cluster analysis. Cluster analysis is the most effective method for solving this problem, because it is intended for combining some samples into classes (clusters) in such a way that the most similar in properties fall into one cluster, but at the same time the samples of different clusters differ as much as possible from each other. Clustering was carried out using the Statistica 10 program. Since at present the reference plasticizer is dioctylphthalate (DOP), the test results of the samples were compared with those of PVC compositions containing DOP. Results and discussions. According to the data obtained, it was found that butoxyethylcreoxyethyl phthalate has the best characteristics in terms of plasticizing ability. The influence of the selected plasticizer on the technological characteristics of PVC-compounds has been studied. The efficiency of the synthesized butoxyethylcreoxyethylphthalate in the PVC composition was evaluated by the indicator (index) of melt flow rate (MFR) and by the indicators of “thermal stability” and “color stability”. Conclusion. Use of the developed additive contributes to the production of PVC compounds with improved rheological characteristics, increased heat resistance and color stability.