A Study on Reaction Kinetics of PTMG/TDI Prepolymer with MOCA by Non-Isothermal DSC

A study on reaction kinetics for a PTMG/TDI prepolymer with 2,2`-dichloro-4,4`-methylenedianiline (MOCA), of which formulations may be generally used for fabricating high performance polyurethane elastomers, was peformed using non-isothermal differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). A number of thermograms were obtained at several constant heating rates, and analysed using Flynn-Wall-Ozawa (FWO) isoconversional method for activation energy, and extended-Avrami equation for reaction order, n. Urea formation reaction of the present system was observed to occur through the simple exothermic reaction process in the temperature range of for the heating rate of . and could be well-fitted with generalized sigmoid function. Though activation energy was nearly constant as , it tended to increase a little at initial stage, but it decreases at later stage by the transformation into diffusion-controlled reaction due to the increased viscosity. Reaction order was evaluated as about 2.8, which was somewhat higher than the generally well-known order values for the various urea reactions. Both the reaction order and reaction rate explicitly increased with temperature, which was considered as the indication of occurring the side reactions such as allophanate or biuret formation.