Tert-butyl acetate: Non-HAP solvent for high-solids epoxy formulations

Xylene is the traditional diluent solvent for formulating epoxy/amine paints used in protective coatings and linings. Currently, it is under regulatory pressure because it is on the hazardous air pollutant (HAP) list and it is also a volatile organic compound (VOC). Ketones and acetate esters are powerful solvents, but their use is limited by their reaction with the amine curatives before paint application. Tert-butyl acetate (t-BAc) proposed as a VOC-exempt solvent, is a nonreactive, non-HAP solvent suitable for both the epoxy resin and amine curative sides of a two-component epoxy system. Molecular modeling predicts very low reactivity of the t-BAc ester functionality with amine nucleophiles as a result of steric hindrance. Long-term aging studies with amine curatives in t-BAc solutions confirm these theoretical results. Kinetics of the reaction of amines with t-BAc and its n-butyl acetate isomer support the view that steric hindrance plays a major role in amine solution stability. Presented at the International Waterborne, High-Solids, and Powder Coatings Symposium, February 21–23, 2001, New Orleans, LA. 3801 West Chester Pike, Newtown Square, PA 19073.     

Iterative solution of the eigenvalue problem for a dielectricwaveguide

The authors present a numerical approach to the simulation of dielectric waveguides that is free of spurious modes and is based on the solution of an eigenvalue problem for the two transverse components of the magnetic field. They introduce a new discretization which has several computational advantages. In particular, by careful design of the discretization procedure, the authors obtain systems of equations for the two components which are equivalent in the sense that a rotation over 900 corresponds to a suitable permutation of indices. The eigenvalue problem is solved iteratively by using an adapted version of the Chebyshev-Arnoldi algorithm. This approach takes full advantage of the sparsity of the matrix and circumvents the large memory requirements and the large computational complexity associated with dense methods. This allows the authors to employ meshes that are sufficiently fine to resolve higher modes without large discretization errors