Preparation and characterization of polystyrene foams from limonene solutions

• CO2 is sorpted in polystyrene and limonene.
• Effect or pressure, temperature, polymer concentration, contact and vent time over the pore cells diameter.
• Higher pressure, lower temperature and concentration are desired to get smaller and more homogeneous pores.
• Nucleation process is favoured at high pressure and low temperature.

The foaming process has been traditionally performed at high temperature because the CO2 and the polymer should behave as a homogeneous solution. The addition of a solvent could avoid the high working temperature while the homogeneity is ensured. Among the terpene oils, limonene outlines as a good candidate to carry out the dissolution of polystyrene because it respects the green chemistry principle, it is highly soluble in CO2 and very compatible with the polymer.The sorption of CO2 is the first step of the foaming process. The presence of the terpene oil enhances the solubility of the gas which is solubilized in the Polystyrene as well as in the limonene. During the foaming process, many parameters can be tuned to customize the foams. In this work, a fractional factorial design of experiment was proposed to determine the effect of pressure, temperature, concentration of the solution, contact time and vent time over the diameter of cells, its standard deviation and the cells density. The proposed foaming process can be simply performed at mild pressure and temperature thanks to the presence of the solvent. The results showed that the most suitable conditions to foam polystyrene from limonene solutions are 90 bar, 30 °C, 0.1 gPS/ml Lim, 240 min contacting and 30 min venting. Finally, the samples were characterized to determine the amount of residual solvent, their glass transition and degradation temperature checking that the foams presented around 5% of solvent traces but did not show any evidence of degradation.

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