Enhancement of EPDM Crosslinked Elastic Properties by Association of Both Covalent and Ionic Networks.

The objective of this study was to replace elastomer crosslinking based on chemical covalent bonds by reversible systems under processing. One way is based on ionic bonds creation, which allows a physical crosslinking while keeping the process reversibility. However, due to the weak elasticity recovery of such a physical network after a long period of compression, the combination of both physical and chemical networks was studied. In that frame, an ethylene-propylene-diene terpolymer grafted with maleic anhydride (EPDM-g-MA) was crosslinked with metal salts and/or dicumyl peroxide (DCP). Thus, the influence of these two types of crosslinking networks and their combination were studied in detail in terms of compression set. The second part of this work was focused on the influence of different metallic salts (KOH, ZnAc