Premium
Toughness and strength improvement of diglycidyl ether of bisphenol‐A by low viscosity liquid hyperbranched epoxy resin
Author(s) -
Zhang Daohong,
Jia Demin
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
journal of applied polymer science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.575
H-Index - 166
eISSN - 1097-4628
pISSN - 0021-8995
DOI - 10.1002/app.23760
Subject(s) - diglycidyl ether , epoxy , materials science , composite material , bisphenol a , toughness , thermosetting polymer , ultimate tensile strength , flexural strength , izod impact strength test , glass transition , fracture toughness , polymer , polymer chemistry
This article reports on the use of low viscosity liquid thermosetting hyperbranched poly(trimellitic anhydride‐diethylene glycol) ester epoxy resin (HTDE) as an additive to an epoxy amine resin system. Four kinds of variety molecular weight and epoxy equivalent weight HTDE as modifiers in the diglycidyl ether of bisphenol‐A (DGEBA) amine systems are discussed in detail. It has been shown that the content and molecular weight of HTDE have important effect on the performance of the cured system, and the performance of the HTDE/DGEBA blends has been maximum with the increase of content and molecular weight or generation of HTDE. The impact strength and fracture toughness of the cured systems with 9 wt % second generation of HTDE are 58.2 kJ/m 2 and 3.20 MPa m 1/2 , which are almost three and two times, respectively, of DGEBA performance. Furthermore, the tensile and flexural strength can be enhanced about 20%. The glass transition temperature and Vicat temperature, however, are found to decrease to some extent. The fracture surfaces are evaluated by using scanning electron microscopy, which showed that the homogeneous phase structure of the HTDE blends facilitates an enhanced interaction with the polymer matrix to achieve excellent toughness and strength enhancement of the cured systems, and the “protonema” phenomenon in SEM has been explained by in situ reinforcing and toughening mechanism and molecular simulation. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 101: 2504–2511, 2006