Paper number 898

INVESTIGATION OF THE MICROWAVE CURING OF AN EPOXY RESIN SYSTEM

Mark Wallace1, David Attwood1, Richard J. Day2, and Frank Heatley3

1Sowerby Research Centre, British Aerospace Operations Ltd., Filton,
Bristol BS12 7QW, U.K.
2Manchester Materials Science Centre, UMIST, Grosvenor Street, Manchester M1 7HS, U.K.
3Department of Chemistry, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, U.K.

Summary A commercial resin system, PR500 from 3M, has been cured using microwave heating. For comparison, the same resin has been cured using a conventional oven. The cured resins has been compared using modulated differential scanning calorimetry, dynamic thermal analysis, infrared spectroscopy and solid state NMR spectroscopy. The results show that the reaction path appears slightly different in the two cases. The epoxy-amine reaction occurs to a greater extent in the microwave cured resin than the epoxy-hydroxyl reaction compared to the thermally cured resin. The dielectric properties are not sensitive to this change. Broadening of the glass transition for microwave cured resins has been previously observed and attributed to a difference in network structure.
Keywords microwave curing, thermal curing, epoxy resin, reaction path, infrared spectroscopy, NMR, differential scanning calorimetry.

Theme : Matrices ; Polymer Matrices

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