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Ultrafast Epoxy‐Anhydride Photopolyaddition Reaction
Author(s) -
Kavalli Tuba,
Wolf Romain,
Lalevée Jacques
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
macromolecular chemistry and physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.57
H-Index - 112
eISSN - 1521-3935
pISSN - 1022-1352
DOI - 10.1002/macp.202000236
Subject(s) - epoxy , materials science , polymerization , curing (chemistry) , irradiation , polymer chemistry , fourier transform infrared spectroscopy , chemical engineering , photochemistry , composite material , polymer , chemistry , physics , nuclear physics , engineering
The conventional epoxy/anhydride reaction is quite slow (more than one hour to reach full conversion at room temperature (RT)) and usually requires thermal treatment at rather high temperature. Ideally, the reaction should be triggered by light for on demand systems i.e. very fast polymerizations (in few seconds) can be carried out in mild conditions (at RT with low energy consumption using cheap and safe light emitting diode (LED) light). In this work, a new approach is proposed with an ultrafast epoxy/anhydride photopolyaddition reaction that can be triggered by near‐UV/visible light. Therefore, a photoinitiating system is developed to cure epoxides in presence of anhydrides as hardeners without any external heat and in a short time scale i.e. few seconds upon light vs. hours at RT without light. Excellent polymerization performances can be observed upon LED@405nm irradiation with full epoxy function conversion. The polymerization kinetics are followed both by real‐time FTIR and real‐time photorheology experiments. As example of the high performance of this new photoactivated epoxy/anhydride process, the curing of epoxy/glass fibre composites is presented. Remarkably, an excellent depth of cure can be obtained in only 20 seconds of irradiation with a LED@405 nm.