Preparation And Properties Of Full Color Thermoplastic Polyurethane Masterbatch

Thermoplastic polyurethane (PUR-T), as a new high-performance elastomer materials in recent years, combines high elasticity of rubber and high hardness, high strength of plastic, and with excellent wear resistance, low temperature resistance and chemical corrosion resistance, etc, simple processing in a variety of ways, which has been widely used in various fields. Now color which is regarded as an indispensable part of industrial products, has aroused increasing concern on coloring of PUR-T. As a special polymer materials colorant, color masterbatch is of simple process, excellent coloring effect and non-polluting, which therefore has almost become the main method for plastics colorings. In consequence, how to apply masterbatch technology into coloring of PUR-T has become an important research orientation of the PUR-T and color masterbatch.This article is about preparation of PUR-T blue masterbatch, PUR-T red masterbatch and PUR-T yellow masterbatch with adding organic pigments or inorganic pigments, polarity dispersant or non-polar dispersant adopting masterbatch technology, through a dry proces. Then we used transmission electron microscope (TEM) to observe the microstructure of the pigment particles, uesedcolor measurement instrument to characterize the color performance of the injection swatches, used optical microscopy to observe pigment dispersion of the film products prepared by flat vulcanization apparatus, and we used melt flow indexer to measure the melt index of the color masterbatches to characterize processing liquidity and used capillary rheometer to measure rheological properties.The experimental results show that, organic pigment Phthalocyanine blue 15:3, Pigment red 144, Pigment yellow 151, inorganic pigment iron oxide red and iron oxide yellow were suitable for the preparation of PUR-T color masterbatch. Different carrier resin and dispersant both had a certain impact on the coloring effect and processing liquidity of color masterbatches. Compared with polyether PUR-T, polyester PUR-T was more suitable as a carrier resin.With the PUR-T masterbatch prepared with organic pigment, the coloring performance and processing liquidity of color masterbatches improved accordingly with increasing amount of dispersant, and achieved the best performance in 6wt% or 8wt% dispersant added and the color performance of products will achieve stability after fluctuating over a period of time. The effect of nonpolar dispersant was superior to polar dispersant.Preparation of PUR-T masterbatch with inorganic pigment iron oxide red and iron oxide yellow, masterbatch and its products had excellent color performance, dispersing performance and processing liquidity, the effect of the addition amount of dispersant was not obvious, added a small amount of dispersant or not added were all allowed. Better processing liquidity and rheological properties when added 4wt% dispersant, and the effect of nonpolar dispersant and polar dispersant were different.On the whole, during the preparation of PUR-T masterbatch with different pigments, both the type and optimum amount of the dispersant haven’t reflected general rule obviously, so it’s necessary to test the optimal formulation through the experiment and the performance test.