High Performance Adhesives from Ethylene Copolymers Via Grafting, 1991 Hot Melt Symposium Proceedings

High heat resistant thermoplastic adhesives are produced by grafting amine terminated nylon-6 oligomer to an ethylene terpolymer back-bone. The graft site in the terpolymer is a maleic anhydride precursor. If more than one amine end per oligomer molecule is present crosslinking will occur.

Excellent low temperature properties are also observed when the terpolymer contains a relatively large amount of a low Tg toughening comonomer.

Excellent high temperature properties are obtained only when nylon is the continuous phase. This occurs at unexpectedly low graft levels. An unusual effect of ethylene terpolymer composition on viscosity of the grafted adhesive made it possible to develop adhesive systems with viscosity sufficiently low for hot melt application.

A plasticizer package was developed that further reduces viscosity and increases low temperature toughness without significantly effecting high temperature performance, since it plasticizes only the ethylene terpolymer phase.

This novel grafting technology offers several degrees of freedom that allow tailoring of viscosity, high temperature performance, low temperature performance, tensile strength, etc.