Curing kinetics and thermal characterization of epoxy resin cured with amidodicarboxylic acids

Thermal properties and the curing kinetics of a system based on DGEBA as epoxy resin and two amidodicarboxylic acids as hardeners (epoxy ring/carboxylic proton at 1/0.7 molar ratio) were investigated using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and simultaneous TG/FT-IR/MS analysis. "Thermokinetics-3" software (Netzsch) was used to simulate the curing reaction mechanisms and thermal degradation of the crosslinked products, simultaneously with the kinetic parameters determination. According to data obtained with this program, the crosslinking processes occurred in two or three steps while the thermal processes occurred in three steps, depending on the chemical structure of the crosslinking agents.