Development of Photocurable Polyacrylate-Based PolyHIPEs and the Study of the Kinetics of Photopolymerization, and of Their Thermal, Mechanical and Hydrocarbon Absorption Properties

This article describes a comprehensive study to obtain polymeric porous materials via a photopolymerization technique, using acrylate-based high internal phase emulsions (HIPEs), as a template. The aim of obtaining these polymers was to use them as hydrocarbon absorbing materials. Kinetics of photopolymerization of the acrylate monomers and of the HIPEs were conducted to optimize the process. The obtained monoliths were characterized by thermal analysis such as differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The morphology and surface area were analyzed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) analysis. The compression properties of the materials were determined, as well as their absorption properties of hydrocarbons such as hexane, diesel, toluene and chloroform. The findings show that the acrylate-HIPEs displayed high reactivity photopolymerizing in 20 min. The glass transition temperature of the materials were in the range of 2 to 83 °C, depending on the ratio of acrylates in the photocurable formulation, displaying the characteristic morphology with voids and interconnecting windows. The polyHIPEs exhibited superior properties of absorption of the studied hydrocarbons. The order of capability of absorption was chloroform > toluene > hexane > diesel. The optimum absorbing material was that with trimethylolpropane triacrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate and isobornyl acrylate in a 1:0.9:2.1 ratio, which absorbed 778% of chloroform, 378% of toluene, 306 % of hexane and 236% of diesel.