Water-borne coatings and pressure-sensitive adhesives produced with polymerizable surfactants.

Abstract

Nowadays, solvent-borne coatings and pressure-sensitive adhesives (PSAs) are still widely used in the industry. However, environmental regulations favor the elimination of solvents, and as a consequence, acrylic water-borne coatings and PSAs have become more attractive due to their intrinsic advantages: environmental safety, ease of handling, and economical reasons. However, water-borne latexes often have poorer properties when they are applied as film forming polymers due to the migration of surfactants. In most of the industrial processes high solids content water-borne latexes have been also of growing interest. However, high solids content latexes are very exigent from the colloidal stability point of view and they may require a substantial amount of surfactant, which is not beneficial for the final application. Therefore there is an interest to synthesize high solids content water-borne latexes with the least possible amount of free surfactants. The main goal of this work was to synthesize high solids content water-borne acrylic latexes using polymerizable surfactants in order to overcome the negative effects caused by the migration of conventional surfactants and hence, to improve the performance of the final products.Polymerizable surfactants and polymerizable stabilizers used in this thesis allowed synthesizing high solids content water-borne polymer dispersions (60 wt% solids content) and improved the performance (e.g. water sensitivity) of the films produced with these dispersions in coatings and pressure-sensitive adhesives applications.