Abstract
Pyrolysis gas chromatography (PyGC) is a powerful tool to give unique information of high polymers. Especially, PyGC is favorable for the practical analysis of insoluble polymeric materials such as vulcanized rubbers. In the previous paper, the structures of commercially available unvulcanized ethylene-propylene-ethylidenenorbornene rubbers (ENB-EPDMs) were investigated by high-resolution PyGC. The observed high-resolution pyrograms of the unvulcanized EPDMs were correlated to the ENB content. In addition, several peaks of the characteristic degradation products were interpreted in terms of the sequence distribution and the ethylene-propylene composition. In this work, vulcanized ENB-EPDMs (V-EPDMs) cured with two types of vulcanizing agents were studied using high-resolution PyGC. Characteristic pyrolysis products formed at 650°C were separated by the high-resolution capillary column, and the resulting pyrograms were interpreted in terms of ENB content in the vulcanized rubber samples. In addition, thermal degradation behavior of the ENB units in V-EPDMs was investigated.
