Thermoplastic elastomers, or TPEs, deserve a post of their own, as they are an interesting polymeric family that is not very well known. You can find a good introduction in Wikipedia. If you are not familiar with Wikipedia, give it a go, you’ll be surprise how thorough it can be considering is free. Just be careful to check the facts elsewhere afterwards, as anyone can edit an entry and some are almost like corporative pages.
Coming back to the initial issue, TPEs have rubber and thermoplastic properties. This combination of properties is achieved by blends of elastomers and thermoplastics or by using copolymers. Usually elastomers are thermosets and the crosslinking is by a covalent created during vulcanisation. TPEs crosslinked thanks to weaker bonds or by bonds being created in only one of TPE’s phases.
In the previous table you can see types of TPEs commercialised, some companies that produced them and their trade name. Links are at the bottom of the post. Arkema and DuPont...
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Renewable TPEs
On July - 21 - 2008
