Luperox^® SP2 Technology: The Ultimate Scorch Protection for Peroxide Crosslinking

Fabien DEBAUD, Laurent KEROMNES, Alfredo DEFRANCISCI, Joseph M. BRENNAN, and Leonard H. PALYS

Arkema S.A. and Arkema Inc., Organic Peroxides R&D

ABSTRACT

Scorch protection over a wide temperature range is critical to improving compounding, crosslinking and productivity when curing elastomers with organic peroxides. Previously^1,2 , Arkema S.A. developed Luperox^® F40M-SP a Scorch Protected di(t-butylperoxy)diisopropylbenzene 40% peroxide masterbatch in EPDM, which was specifically formulated for use in EPDM. Despite the commercial successes of the SP peroxide technology, there are manufacturing processes and rubber formulations that require even greater scorch protection. To address these manufacturing challenges, we recently developed the SP2 peroxide technology with an Enhanced Scorch Protected package compared to the original SP grade. Furthermore, this SP2 technology has been applied to formulations of dicumyl peroxide and di(t-butylperoxy)diisopropyl-benzene, the two most widely used organic peroxides for crosslinking elastomers.

In summary, the SP2 peroxide technology provides longer scorch time protection for more demanding compounding and crosslinking operations and is effective in a very wide range of peroxide-crosslinkable elastomers including AEM, CPE, EPDM, EVA, EOM and HNBR studied in this paper. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the state of cure, cure speed and the improvement of scorch time performance can be further tailored to your specific process needs by combining the SP2 peroxides with select crosslinking coagents.