As an important member of the organosilicon polymer family, amino silicone oil is a functional material obtained by modifying polysiloxane with organic amine compounds. The active amino groups on its molecular chain endow it with excellent softness, adsorption and reactivity, making it widely used in many fields. However, the traditional synthesis of amino silicone oil has pain points such as low reaction efficiency, uneven product performance and obvious yellowing. With the improvement of industry requirements for product quality and environmental protection, the optimization of synthesis process and innovation of modification technology have become the core driving forces for the high-quality development of the amino silicone oil industry.
The traditional synthesis of amino silicone oil mainly adopts the ring-opening copolymerization method, using tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH) as the catalyst, octamethylcyclotetrasiloxane (D4) and amino silane coupling agent as monomers, and reacting at high temperature to generate products. However, this process has problems such as long reaction time (usually more than 6 hours), low yield, wide molecular weight distribution of products, and easy yellowing of products, which limits its application in high-end fields. To solve these problems, researchers first started with catalyst optimization and adopted a new type of phosphazene base catalyst P4-t-Bu to replace the traditional TMAH catalyst, achieving significant breakthroughs.
The phosphazene base catalyst P4-t-Bu has higher catalytic activity. At a low dosage of only 100ppm, it can shorten the reaction time from 6 hours to 1 hour, increase the product yield to 93.59%, and narrow the molecular weight distribution, effectively improving the uniformity of product performance. In addition, the innovation of molecular structure modification technology has further expanded the performance boundary of amino silicone oil, among which polyether modification is the most widely used method. By introducing polyoxyethylene ether segments with good wettability and emulsifying properties, the hydrophilicity and self-emulsifying ability of amino silicone oil can be significantly improved, solving the problems of difficult emulsification and limited application range of traditional products.
At present, the synthesis process of amino silicone oil is developing towards greenization, high efficiency and continuity. New processes such as atmospheric pressure polymerization and microemulsion polymerization are constantly maturing, which greatly reduce energy consumption and pollutant emissions, conforming to the requirements of the "double carbon" strategy. At the same time, the integrated application of multiple modification technologies such as epoxy modification and phenyl modification has effectively solved the pain points such as product yellowing and insufficient temperature resistance, promoting the upgrading of amino silicone oil from general-purpose to high-end functional type, and laying a solid technical foundation for its application in more high-end fields.