Curing kinetics of epoxy-urethane copolymers

The cure of the epoxy resin diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A (Araldyt GY9527) with a mixture of cycloaliphatic amines (Distraltec) was studied, and the focus was on the effect of the copolymerization with a commercial polyurethane (PU) elastomer (Desmocap 12). A simplified phenomenological model was proposed to represent the copolymerization reaction. It considered the effect of the temperature and the concentration of the elastomer on the reaction rate, and it was simple enough to be included in models of processing conditions. A nonlinear regression analysis of the experimental conversion data obtained from differential scanning calorimetry was utilized to find the best fitting parameters to Kamal's equation for the chemically controlled part of the reaction (short times) under isothermal and constant heating-rate conditions. The Rabinowitch approach together with the Addam–Gibbs theory was utilized to introduce the effect of diffusion control at the end of the reaction on the overall constant for the reaction rate. The Di Benedetto equation was used to predict the conversion at which vitrification takes place for each run. Experimental results for conversions higher than this critical conversion were utilized to obtain information about the diffusion kinetic constant using a nonlinear regression analysis as previously. The overall model obtained was used to calculate a calorimetric conversion and reaction rate as functions of time, which was in excellent agreement with the experimental results. The addition of PU elastomers affected the values of the activation energies of the chemically and diffusion controlled parts of the reaction, as well as the final conversion reached by the epoxy–amine system. The proposed model allowed prediction of all the observed features using parameters that were independent of the temperature of the curing reaction. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 79: 1771–1779, 2001