Enhanced performance of environmental resistance and reprocessability of epoxidized natural rubber via incorporating fluorinated short side chains and β‐hydroxyl ester bonds

AbstractThe current challenge of recycling rubber articles beyond the failure time has created an increasingly huge burden on the environment. Therefore, there is a growing focus on enhancing the environmental resistance and reprocessability of rubber materials. In this work, we present a simple way to introduce the fluorinated short‐side chains on the molecular chains of epoxidized natural rubber (ENR) via the reaction of epoxy groups and carboxyl groups. The results indicated that the short fluorinated side chains endowed ENR the excellent environmental resistance such as thermal stability, thermal oxygen resistance and solvent resistance. At the same time, the cross‐linking network formed by the thermally reversible β‐hydroxyl ester bonds enables the rubber to a good reprocessability. The second recycled ENR‐DTSA‐F had achieved 90.4% of the retention ratio of the tensile strength and reached 69.9% of the retention ratio of the elongation at break compared to the original sample. This work provides a simple method for preparing ENR materials with good environmental resistance and reprocessability.