Chemical Stopper for Runaway Propoxylation

Propoxylation becomes important more and more for making materials of urethane foam and surfactants in industry. The actual production of polyether polyols for urethane foam amounted to 297, 750 t in 1990, and was estimated at 300, 000 t in 1991. However, propylene oxide (PO) is one of a low-boiling-point monomer which reacts so fast at high temperature, that it is very important to know how to stop propoxylation when it becomes uncontrollable. In this paper, it was proved that runaway propoxylation could be stopped with dosing phsphoric acid in reaction mass.