Brian....you are insightful....

I am a chemist, but not a polymer chemist, and will, as usual, put my opinion
down, with the caveat that free advice is often not worth what you paid for
it...

First it is not clear that you want/need a polymer chemist, because it is
only incidental that the Brominated Phenol is in a polymer...what you are
concerned about is the presence of free Br- and this will/would happen
whether or not the Brominated Phenol is part of a polymer.

My understanding is that the Br-Phenol bond is reasonably, but not perfectly
strong, and it is almost certain that the more Br- you have on the Phenol,
the less stable each bond becomes, and since there are 5 sites that a Br
could bond to, and we are using 4 of them, my suspicion is that the last one
is reasonably weak.  The test it self could free some of the Br-, also,
baking, especially in the presence of moisture could also likely free up the
Br-.

The situation is actually pretty easy to sort out, as free Br- is very easily
water soluble, so, someone with an ion chromatograph could simple wash
laminate with deionized water at various points in the process, and report
what they discover.  (Why do I feel that the results on this will vary
widely, not only from one laminator to another, but from one batch of resin
to another?)

Anybody with an IC, and some free time?

Rudy Sedlak
RD Chemical Company

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