Investigation of Window Silicone Sealant Weathering Using Evolved Gas Analysis and Pyrolysis Gas Chromatography with Mass Spectrometry

TL;DR

This study examines how weathering affects silicone sealants by analyzing gas evolution and pyrolysis, finding that aging changes thermal degradation patterns without altering the main polymer structure.

Contribution

The study introduces evolved gas analysis combined with pyrolysis GC-MS to detect weathering effects on silicone sealants, revealing structural changes without major chemical degradation.

Findings

Aged sealants showed lower siloxane evolution temperatures (450–510 °C) compared to fresh samples (610–710 °C).

Weathering primarily affects thermal evolution profiles rather than the overall PDMS structure.

The abundance of the three largest siloxanes increased slightly with weathering, while most abundant siloxanes remained unchanged.

Abstract

Thermal degradation of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)-based silicone sealants was investigated using evolved gas analysis (EGA) for rapid temperature screening, combined with multistep pyrolysis gas chromatography with mass spectrometric detection. The identified products were cyclic siloxanes, ranging from hexamethyl cyclotrisiloxane to hexadecamethyl cyclooctasiloxane. Aged and weathered sealants showed distinctly lower siloxane evolution temperatures (450–510 °C) compared to fresh samples (610–710 °C), indicating more facile polymer degradation. This trend was evident in both EGA-MS and Py-GC-MS, with EGA-MS showing a more pronounced effect, suggesting its potential for detecting sealant failure. Notably, the total evolved amounts of specific siloxanes remained nearly constant, suggesting that weathering primarily affects the thermal evolution profiles rather than the overall PDMS structure. The abundance of the three largest-size siloxanes increased (3–7%) with the weathering; in contrast, the changes in the amounts of the most abundant siloxanes were insignificant throughout all samples, regardless of the extent of weathering. These observations suggest that weathering induces changes in details of material structure, e.g., intermolecular interactions, rather than substantial chemical alterations to the PDMS structure.

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