Lipophilic Super-Absorbent Swelling Gels as Cleaners for Use on Weapons Systems and Platforms.

摘要

Increasingly stringent environmental regulations on volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) demand the development of disruptive technologies for cleaning weapons systems and platforms. Currently employed techniques suffer from safety and efficiency shortcomings. This work proposed to use novel lipophilic super-absorbent swelling gels as a disruptive solid state cleaning technology to overcome limitations of currently employed cleaning techniques. Results were compared with a commercially available alkylstyrene copolymer (imbiber beads). The cleaning ability of the gels was compared with the standard solvent cleaner tri-chloroethylene (TCE) following American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) G122-96(2008) test methods and MIL-PRF-680B procedure with MIL-PRF-10924 test grease. Polymer gel cleaners exhibited analogues extent and rate of cleaning as the TCE. The work concludes that the recyclable superabsorbent polymer cleaners developed in this research will allow drastic reduction in the use of VOC containing solvents and HAP release.