General conditions and experimental design of sustained frontal photopolymerization in photopolymerizable liquid compositions

It has been shown that, in order to accomplish frontal photopolymerization in the mode of a self-sustained travelling wave, it is necessary to use compositions that are optically transparent behind the front and experience the onset of gelling at a minimal degree of polymerization, e.g., systems based on oligoether (meth)acrylates. With the use of a composition containing oligocarbonate methacrylate and the o-benzoquinone-amine photoinitiator system, frontal photopolymerization in a layer of more than 100 mm in thickness was experimentally revealed. It was shown that the photoinitiator and monomer conversion fronts synchronously propagate into the layer. It was found that the coordinate of the leading edge of the monomer conversion front h is related to the irradiated time τ by the equations h = A 1 log τ − B and h = A 2 τ − B at the first and the second step of frontal polymerization, respectively. It was found that the thickness of the area of the formulation layer in which the condition h = A 1 logτ − B is fulfilled is equal to the width of the photoinitiator and monomer conversion front. A general equation of motion of the coordinate of the photoinitiator conversion label in the layer of a liquid photopolymerizable composition during sustained frontal photopolymerization was proposed for describing experimental data.