| Summary: | Adhesives are an essential class of industrial polymers with applications ranging from adhesive tapes and sticky notes through to resins used in mines. This work showcases the development of new hot-melt adhesives to repair conveyor belts in mines. Conveyor belts commonly used in the mining industry to haul ore can break down due to wear or failure. Any downtime in the production process is very costly. A repair tool of choice is, in this case, a hot-melt adhesive: it can be applied quickly, and once applied, it does not require a long curing time until it has the desired properties that the process demands. Polyamide-based hotmelt adhesives are important industrial materials that allow quick repair of breakages of conveyor belts on mining sites. This thesis aimed to develop a range of polyamide resins with different thermal behaviors for potential application as base resins in hot-melt adhesive formulations to be applied in the mining and resources extraction industry. Several bio-based polyamides were synthesized by solution-state and melt-state polycondensation of the bio-based diacid, and various aromatic and aliphatic diamines. The bio-based monomers have a high dimensionality (monofunctional, difunctional, trifunctional molecules, for example). Separation is thus needed to obtain meaningful information about the polymerization process. The solution-state and melt-state polycondensation of dimer acids, and alkyl and oligo(polypropylene oxide) diamine was monitored, for the first time, using pressure-assisted capillary electrophoresis. Ultimately, this work allowed the development of new characterization methods for complex polyamide resins, both at the molecular level and on a macroscopic level and enabled better understanding of the underlying mechanism of adhesion and resin material properties. It enables the development of a multitude of tailor-made polyamide base resins to be utilized in hot-melt adhesive formulations that can be used in very different mining environments (arctic-like to sub-Saharan) ...
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