Developments in Low Emission Catalysts for Flexible Foams.An investigation of the Performance Balance Required Between Low Emission Characteristics,Kinetic Behavior and Physical Properties,Especially Deterioration After Humid Aging

摘要

A research program is ongoing at Huntsman Petrochemical Corporation to develop new low emission catalysts with improved performance over today's best commercial options.As part of this research effort,the current work describes intermediate achievements with a selection of experimental products aimed at meeting the requirements of flexible foam applications and therefore investigates foam processing,foam physical properties,foam emission and kinetic performance.It is shown that low emission performance can be achieved with a variety of molecular structures that include several experimental molecules as well as commercial low emission products such as JEFFCAT~(R) ZR-50,Z-130 or ZF-10 catalyst.The kinetic investigation reveals clear differences between the experimental catalysts.Though these differences are important to understand in order to progress further in the design of more optimized molecules,they were not found to have a significant impact on foam performance in the formulations tested.As anticipated,larger differences were seen in foam physical properties,especially on humid aging performance.Two experimental catalysts were shown to bring some improvement in performance compared to commercial low emission catalysts.