Thermoplastic elastomers are a promising class of polymeric materials whose properties are close to those of conventional rubbers. Thermoplastic elastomers are recycled by high-performance methods used to process plastics in contrast to ordinary rubbers. Also thermoplastic elastomers exclude the stage of vulcanization from the technological scheme and they are capable of multiple processing. The problem of modeling of the kinetics of the crosslinking process in the preparation of a thermal elastoplast with a treelike structures was formulated and solved. The polyfunctional coupling agent used as crosslinking agent for crosslinking of diblock to produce thermoplastic elastomers with a treelike structures. A kinetic scheme of the coupling process is proposed. It based on the available experimental data on the molecular weight distribution of thermoplastic elastomers and the analysis of various combinations of polymer molecules. The scheme takes into account the possibility of attaching the active diblock to each functional group of the combining agent molecule of different structures. The mathematical model of the process taking place in the reactor of an ideal mixing of a periodic action is represented of the system in the form of differential equations. Modeling the process, it is assumed that the rate of the coupling reaction depends on the mobility of the molecules which enter into the reaction. The sum of the squares of the discrepancy of experimentally determined and theoretically predicted concentrations of thermoplastic elastomers of each structure is adopted as an optimality criterion for solving the problem of parametric identification. The computational experiment showed that the combining agent reacts with the active diblock mainly in two and three functional groups. The synthesized model allows to evaluate the concentration of the coupling agent, polystyrene-polybutadiene-lithium and thermoplastic elastomer with different molecular weight in a continuous time domain. The relative error in the results is 9.3%. The analysis results obtained allows us to conclude that the proposed model qualitatively correctly describes the coupling process.

thermoplastic elastomers, polymer tree-like structure, coupling agent, of the reactor material balance mixing batch

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