Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-1-2020

Department

Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geospatial Engineering

Abstract

Thermoplastic polyurethane elastomers (TPUs) are widely used in a variety of applications as a result of flexible and superior performance. However, few scholars pay close attention on the design and synthesis of TPUs through the self‐determined laboratory process, especially on definite of chemical structures and upon the influence on properties. To investigate the properties of synthesized modifier based on chemical structure, firstly each kind of unknown structure and composition ratio of TPUs was determined by using a new method. Furthermore, the thermal characteristics and mechanical properties of modifiers were exposed by thermal characteristics and mechanics performance tests. The experimental results indicate that TPUs for use as an asphalt modifier can successfully be synthesized with the aid of semi‐prepolymer method. The linear backbone structure of TPUs with different hard segment contents were determined by micro test methods. The polyester‐based TPUs had thermal behavior better than the polyether-based TPUs; conversely, the low temperature performance of polyether‐based TPUs was superior. Most importantly, it was found that the relative molecular mass of TPUs exhibited a weak effect on the mechanical properties, whereas the crystallinity of hard segment showed a significant influence on the properties of TPUs.

Publisher's Statement

© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.3390/ma13214991

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Materials

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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