ESTIMATION OF CURE
KINETIC PARAMETERS FOR EPOXY/AMINE SYSTEMS VIA A DYNAMIC APPROACH
C.C. Lin,1,2,*, T.S. Leu2, H.H. Chu1
1 Department of Chemical
Engineering,
2 Department
of Chemical Engineering, Yung-Ta Institute of Technology and Commerce,
ABSTRACT
The cure kinetic parameters of diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A using 4,4΄-diaminodiphenylmethane (DDM) or a space interference amine, bis(4-amino-3,5-dimethylphenyl)naphthylmethane (BADN) as the curing agents were investigated by using a non-isothermal differential scanning calorimeter (DSC). In this study we used a non-isothermal dynamic analysis to determine the kinetic parameters over the whole range of conversion for the amine-cured systems. The kinetic parameters can be obtained rapidly at different reaction regions. This curing process also avoids the “arrested” problem arising from the vitrification, which occurs often in the isothermal curing process. The exothermic peak temperature shifted from the DSC trace can be attributed to the increasing heating rate. Using the dynamic analysis, the heating rate for each run must be in appropriate ranges, and the simplified nth-order model was considered inappropriate to the epoxy/amine reactions in this study. On increasing heating rate, all the samples tested showed an increase in maximum conversion rate (xmax) during curing. It is obvious that the non-isothermal curing process is greatly improved and consolidated when our analytic approach is used.
Key words: cure kinetic, differential
scanning calorimeter, epoxy, amine
*Corresponding author:
Mailing
address: Chu-Chen Lin, Department of Chemical Engineering, Yung-Ta Institute of Technology and
Commerce,
Tel: 886-8-7233733 ext.
225; Fax: 886-8-7217730;
E-mail: lcc66666@ms56.hinet.net