Effects of DMP-30 on curing kinetics and mechanical properties of epoxy resin/anhydride system

Key words:  modified accelerator DMP-30  epoxy resin  curing kinetics

Abstract:

Effects of different DMP-30 contents on viscosity-time characteristics, curing kinetics and mechanical properties of DMP-30/E-44/MeTHPA blend system were studied by means of differential scanning calorimeter (DSC), universal tensile testing machine and scanning electron microscope (SEM), etc. The curing process parameters of the blends were determined by extrapolation during actual production operation. The results indicate that DMP-30 reduces the gelation time and significantly accelerates the curing process of the blended system. With the increase of DMP-30, the apparent activation energy of blending system first decreases and then increases, but the mechanical strength shows a trend of decrease after increase first. When the DMP-30 content is 3Mphr, the blended system shows the best mechanical performance and the lowest activation energy among studied samples, which is 69.21 kJ/mol. The tensile strength, tensile modulus and elongation at break reach the maximum values, which are 85.8 MPa, 1 536.9 MPa and 18.2％, respectively. When the DMP-30 content is 3Mphr, the gelling temperature, curing temperature and post-treatment temperature of the system are 92.54 ℃, 117.86℃ and 129.56 ℃, respectively.