Abstract

Solid-State NMR Studies of Environmentally Friendly Flame Retardants,

A. Brinkmann, V. Brodski, D. J. A. De Ridder, K. Goubitz, R. Peschar, R. B. Helmholdt, H. Schenk, V. M. Litvinov, A. Braam, B. Coussens, S. Jahromi, N. Aelmans, and A. P. M. Kentgens
17th European Experimental NMR Conference / 32nd Cogress Ampere, Lille, France (Sep. 2004), poster.
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For many applications, polymer based materials have to pass fire retardance tests. Frequently, halogenated compounds are used as additives to achieve this property, but these suffer from the disadvantage of being environmentally hazardous under the influence of heat. Therefore it is of great interest to develop environmentally friendly flame retardants, which may be incorporated into polymers. A promising group of compounds is considered to be melamine phosphates. An important goal to improve flame retardants is to relate their chemical composition and structure to their mechanism of functioning. We used solid-state NMR spectroscopy to gain detailed information about the proton positions, proximities and the hydrogen bonding network in different melamine phosphates.

The experimental results were obtained by applying state of the art pulse sequences to record high-resolution proton and heteronuclear correlation spectra of types 1H-13C, 1H-15N and 1H-31P. In addition we determined N-H distances. The experimental results are combined with the approximate powder structures obtained by X-ray diffraction together with a molecular modeling-Rietveld refinement approach. A model for the proton positions in the different melamine phosphates is presented.