Preparation of Photocurable Porous Polyacrylates with Hydrocarbon Absorbing Properties

Acrylate-based High Internal Phase Emulsions (HIPEs) were photopolymerized to yield porous materials aimed to use them as hydrocarbon absorbing materials. Di and triacrylates were used to prepare the photocurable formulations and their reactivity was determined using Real-Time FTIR spectroscopy to optimize the type, and proportion of the monomers and of the photoinitiators. Thermal analysis techniques including differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) were used to characterise the generated monoliths. Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) analysis and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) were used to examine the morphology and surface area. It was assessed how efficiently the materials absorbed hydrocarbons such hexane, diesel, toluene, and chloroform as well as their compression and absorption properties. The findings show that the acrylate-HIPEs displayed high reactivity photopolymerizing in 20 min. The glass transition temperature of the materials was in the range of 2 to 83°C, depending on the ratio of acrylates in the photocurable formulation, displaying the characteristic morphology with voids and interconnecting windows. A cost-effective process to prepare porous polyacrylate materials with properties of organic solvents absorption, was developed. The polyHIPEs were obtained via a photopolymerization technique, irradiating formulations of the acrylic monomers T, E and I, for 20 minutes at 60 mW/cm2 using 1 mol % of both photoinitiators BAPO and DMPA. The polyHIPEs exhibited superior properties of absorption of the studied hydrocarbons. The order of capability of absorption was chloroform > toluene > hexane > diesel. The optimum absorbing material was that with trimethylolpropane triacrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate and isobornyl acrylate in a 1:0.9:2.1 ratio, which absorbed 778% of chloroform, 378% of toluene, 306 % of hexane and 236% of diesel.