0000000001087416

AUTHOR

J. T. Carter

Cure behaviour of epoxy resin matrices for carbon fibre composites

The cure behaviour of two resin formulations (with high and low curing agent content respectively) of an epoxy resin system, used as matrix for carbon fibre composites, was studied through calorimetric analysis. The aim of this work is to investigate the kinetics of this specific epoxy system in order to be able to choose a proper set of processing parameters which will give good composite material properties. The shape of the conversion curves gives evidence of the differences in the cure kinetics of the two systems. Furthermore, the values of the activation energies were determined both for formulation in the conversion range where vitrification occurs, following a phenomenological approa…

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Reactive blending of functionalized acrylic rubbers and epoxy resins

A high molecular weight acrylonitrile/butadiene/methacrylic acid (Nipol 1472) rubber is chosen to control processability and mechanical properties of a TGDDM (tetra glycidyl diphenyl methane) based epoxy resin formulation for aerospace composite applications. The physical blend of rubber and epoxy resin, achieved by dissolution of all the components in a common solvent, forms a heterogeneous system after solvent removal and presents coarse phase separation during cure that impairs any practical relevance of this material. A marked improvement of rubber-epoxy miscibility is achieved by reactive blending ('pre-reaction') the epoxy oligomer with the functional groups present in the rubber. The…

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