synthesis of ethylene bis-stearamide for acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene polymer

ethylene bis-stearamide is one of the important acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene ()abs)( polymer additives, which is used as lubricant, slip agent and mold release agent. in this research, ethylene bis-stearamide for abs application was synthesized using stearic acid and ethylene diamine under reflux condition. refluxing prevented ethylenediamine from evaporation and thus the initial molar ratio was maintained unchanged. the other role of refluxing was to prevent the oxidation of ethylene diamine by removal of oxygen which might have been present inside the reactor. the synthesized samples were characterized by fourier transform infrared spectroscopy ()ftir)(, total acid number and melting point. the total acid number of the synthesized samples in the lab, bench scale 1 kg)( and pilot scale 30 kg)( were 6.5, 8.7 and 8.6 mgkoh/g, respectively, and their melting points were in 141-144 °c range. it was found that total acid number values of samples are inversely proportional with reaction time. the longer the reaction time, the higher was the total acid number and sample purity. compounding was carried out using abs containing synthesized and reference ethylene bis-stearamide and the physical-mechanical properties of the samples were measured. the obtained results showed that, the measured properties such as melt flow index, impact resistance, softening temperature, heat deflection temperature, tensile strength and hardness for the compound prepared using synthesized ethylene bis-stearamide match very well with those of reference compound.