Chemical analysis of silicone outgassing
Randy M. Villahermosa, Alexis D. Ostrowski · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2008
Silicone materials pose a contamination control challenge because of their ubiquity in satellite hardware, the tendency of the material and its outgassed contaminants to migrate along surfaces, and the difficulty in cleaning away the residue. To devise effective mitigation strategies, accurate knowledge of the chemical identity and properties of the outgassed species is needed. This information is critical for modeling silicone outgassing deposition processes and for developing effective cleaning methods. To this end, a chemical analysis study of several common silicone materials was conducted to identify and characterize the outgassed contaminants. Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) and other laboratory techniques were used to identify and characterize the outgassed species. In this report, the results of this study will be discussed with a particular emphasis on comparing the outgassing properties of the species collected from these materials to DC704, which is typically used to model silicone outgassing.