Contactless Raman Spectroscopy-Based Monitoring of Physical States of Silyl-Modified Polymers during Cross-Linking

Cross-linking of silyl-modified polymers occurs at the alkoxysilane groups attached to the ends of polymer chains by hydrolysis and polycondensation mechanisms in the presence of moisture. During these reactions, three different physical states can be identified (viscous, skin effect and cross-linked state). Knowledge of the evolution of these states at each reaction time is essential to determine the open time for the adhe-sive industry and is generally obtained by a manual method. Automation of this moni-toring could avoid operator error and could be used for very long cross linking reac-tions or to screen a large number of catalysts. Thus, a contactless micro process tech-nology was developed to correlate these physical states with an optical technology, Raman spectroscopy, by monitoring the decrease in intensity of the Si-OCH3 groups during chemical reactions. This online characterization method can also be used to compare the efficiencies of several catalysts for the cross-linking of silyl-modified polymers, using a minimum amount of chemical materials.