Soy castor oil based fire safety UV curable coatings
Researchers have presented an efficient halogen-free reactive flame-retardant active diluent for oil-based fire safety coatings.
Soy-castor oil-based polyurethane acrylate prepolymer (SCPUA) was synthesised by using epoxidised soybean oil and ricinoleic acid as raw materials. A cost-effective halogen-free flame retardant phosphorous silicon methacrylate monomer (PSMAM) was also synthesised and used as an efficient reactive diluent to mix with SCPUA to develop a novel vegetable oil-based UV-curable coating system. Benefited from the addition of PSMAM, the limiting oxygen index (LOI) of the coatings reaches up to 23%, and the coatings can self-extinguish instantly (within 1 s) after removing from flame, indicating that these coatings possess remarkable flame-retardant performance. PSMAM promotes the formation of a dense and continuous char layer on the coating surface to serve as a heat and oxygen barrier, thus providing the coatings with remarkable flame retardancy.
Excellent performances
More strikingly, these coatings exhibit excellent hardness, flexibility, adhesion and remarkable acid and alkali resistance as well as boiling water resistance. Acording to the researchers, excellent performances and cost-effective feature as well as the facile synthesis process make these newly-developed halogen-free flame-retardant vegetable-oil based UV-curable coatings more potential for practical applications.
The study has been published in Progress in Organic Coatings, Volume 163, February 2022.
