TG and DSC as tools to analyse the thermal behaviour of EVA copolymers

This paper analyses the thermal behaviour of six EVA copolymers supplied by REPSOL Company. In relation to crystallization and melting temperatures, both of them decrease when the vinyl acetate percentage increases, in agreement with the fact that polyethylene is a semi-crystalline material, whereas polyvinylacetate is an amorphous polymer. Actually, when the vinyl acetate percentage reaches 30%, the copolymer is practically amorphous. The non-isothermal crystallization was modelled with the modified Avrami model that showed, with the exception of EVA-460 (the material with higher vinyl acetate percentage), the presence of a secondary crystallization due to spherulite impingement in the later stage of the non-isothermal crystallization. The TG analysis indicated two weight loss stages, the first one due to acetic acid loss and the second one due to fragments of polymer backbone, which appear as two separate peaks in the DTG plots. Finally, due to the linear dependence of melting and crystallization temperatures and of the minimum value of DTG peaks on vinyl acetate percentage, it can be concluded that both TG and DSC techniques can be employed to determine the vinyl acetate percentage of a certain copolymer.

Fingerprint analysis of FTIR spectra of polymers containing vinyl acetate

The analysis of materials using Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy has a unique area called the fingerprint region for each compound. However, this area is almost never discussed because of its complexity due to the large number of signals that appear in it. In this work, the fingerprint region analysis of the ethylene–vinyl acetate copolymer (EVA) with different percentages of vinyl acetate (VA) (18%, 28%, 40%) was performed. In comparison with other instrumental techniques, the crystallinity and structural arrangement of the EVA copolymers were determined simply and economically. The crystallinities for EVA18, EVA28 and EVA40 were 24.39%, 6.95% and1.03%, respectively. In terms of structural ordering, the number of linear chains of EVA copolymer decreases as the concentration of VA increases, which favors the reduction of degrees of freedom and the formation of hydrogen bonds.