Peroxyketals

We offer the world's largest range of peroxyketals under the well-known trademark of Trigonox®.

Structure
Peroxyketals have the general structure ROOR₁OOR wherein R and R₁ mostly represent alkyl and/or aryl groups.

In general peroxyketals (also know as perketals) are thermally unstable compounds. The O-O bonds break at relatively low temperatures and forms free radicals: ROOR₁O· and ·OR·.

Depending on the type of perketal and reaction conditions cleavage of the peroxide bond may be followed by β-scission, chain transfer and many other rearrangement reactions.

Applications
Peroxyketals are used as free radical initiators in the polymerization of various monomers. Some of them also find their way in the curing of thermoset resins and the crosslinking of elastomers and thermoplastics.

Half-life
The most important characteristic of an organic peroxide is its rate of decomposition expressed by its half-life. It is the time required to reduce the original amount of peroxide at a given temperature by 50%.  

For polymerization initiators the half-life is determined by differential scanning calorimetry-thermal activity monitoring (DSC-TAM) of a dilute solution of a perketal in monochlorobenzene. Peroxyketals are available in a wide range of activities. Their 1 hour half-life temperatures lie in the range of 105-121 °C.

Half-life temperatures of our peroxyketals can be found in the AkzoNobel product brochure "Initiators and Reactor Additives for Thermoplastics" which can be downloaded from this page.

For crosslinking applications kinetic data are given in our brochure "Crosslinking elastomers and thermoplastics".

On request we also provide decomposition mechanisms for some of our peroxyketals. We also offer a number of cyclic peroxides.