Polymer & Co.
Solubility Test
cHECK OF sPECIFICATIONS
Our final clamp is supposed to be used in different environments, as in a laboratory for example, to take off objects in an oven for example.
In this idea, we wanted to ensure the fact that the polymers used are not soluble in the most common solvents. So, for these tests, we’ve taken a piece of the polymer filament, around 10mg, and put it in 2ml of solvent at room temperature for 3 days. The results are shown in the table below:
Table 1 : Solubility of Nylon 230 and nGen_Flex
Conclusion
We see that the major part of our object, which is made of Nylon 230, is not soluble in all the solvents used. And that the flexible part, which is added to improve the adherence, can solubilize in DCM and chloroform. The object must thus not be in contact with these two solvents, which can lead to a degradation, even if it is not the degradation of the main structure of the object.
Furthermore, there are other solvents that we do not have tested, as acetonitrile or dimethyl sulfoxide for example. The tests were made at low temperature, around 23°C, which does not correspond to the temperature of the oven. Lastly, we observed that the nGen_flex has a greater tendency to swell in solution, but this is not an issue, because the nGen_flex part is added around some part of the final object and will not lead to a default structure if it swells.
However, we can now be sure that the object can also resist to a large range of common solvents in chemistry laboratories.
By Benoît