It was found that a solid-state graft-copolymerized material dispersible in water could be obtained by electrobeam irradiation of a mixture in a sheet-like form consisting of an epoxy resin and polymerizable monomers including methacrylic acid, styrene and ethyl acrylate. Further, a series of experiments was carried out in order to study the relationship between the reaction conditions and the properties of the resultant graft-copolymer compositions.
Determinations of the molecular weight distributions were separately carried out for both the polymer fraction of acrylic copolymer and the polymer fraction of epoxy resin by gel-permeation chromatography of the graft-copolymer composition applying two kinds of detecting methods, that is measurement of refractive indexes and UV-absorption spectrography, in parallel.
The curve of molecular weight distribution had a maximum at the point of about 100,000 in the case of the polymer fraction of acrylic copolymer, being rather high as compared with that in the cases of catalytic methods in which solvents were required. The present method showed a notable feature of polymerization under a highly viscous state so that a higher molecular weight was obtained for the polymer fraction of acrylic copolymer when the concentration of the epoxy resin was higher and the molecular weight of the epoxy resin was higher in the starting composition.
The fraction of grafted polymer determined by the fractional precipitation was 15% or more which was higher than below 10% in the case of catalytic method. This fact should be recognized as another feature of the polymerization process under a highly viscous state.
The higher the dose rate, the lower value of molecular weight was obtained for the polymer fraction of acrylic copolymer and contrastively the grafting ratio became higher. These are the indication of the increase of termination reaction and the simultaneous increase of starting radicals for grafting in accordance with the increase of the concentration of reactive species.
An emulsion was obtained from the resultant composition of graft copolymer by addition of alkaline water following to kneading with solvent. A tough coating film was obtained by applying and heat-drying of the above emulsion.
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