The Mechanism of the Deactivating Effect
Abstract It was shown by one of us that certain substances, called deactivates, can protect vulcanized rubber against aging by a process which is different from that of antioxidants. The proposed mechanism involved a deactivation of the primary peroxides by transforming them into oxides of rubber without causing any chain scission. This hypothesis, however, did not appear to be completely satisfactory. In fact, deactivators do not protect raw rubber against oxidation, but actually accelerate its degradation in solution, especially in the presence of a peroxide which enhances this deterioration. Moreover, if was shown that the deactivators possess a chemical structure which is very similar to that of certain vulcanization accelerators, and also that they have an effect on the vulcanization. This had led to the suggestion that their effect could be attributed to the initial structure of the vulcanized rubber. We have considered the possibility of obtaining some useful information on this subject by means of stress relaxation measurements which involve the decrease in tensile strength with time of a stretched test piece. The measurements were carried out either by maintaining the test piece at constant elongation (continuous relaxation), or by stretching the relaxed sample to a constant elongation from time to time (discontinuous relaxation). It has been established that the continuous relaxation method accounts solely for the chain scissions which are produced in the vulcanized rubber network, whereas the intermolecular linkages formed during the tests contribute to the discontinuous relaxation picture. The results of some preliminary experiments we have carried out are given in Figure 1. Two rubber compounds, accelerated with diphenylguanidine and mercaptobenzothiazole, respectively, and known to have quite different aging properties, were employed. Vulcanizates containing either an antioxidant A (phenyl-2-naphthylamine) or a deactivator D (zinc mercaptobenzimidazolate) were compared with the control vulcanizates T.