Cure modeling and monitoring of epoxy/amine resin systems. I. Cure kinetics modeling

The cure kinetics of four epoxy/amine systems including commercial RTM6 and F934 resins have been investigated under both isothermal and dynamic curing conditions. Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) was the thermoanalytical technique used to determine the cure kinetics of these resin systems. The complexity of the cure reactions, illustrated by the results, was attributed to the variety of chemical reactions between the epoxy and the amine groups. Various cure kinetics models were implemented in order to achieve an accurate description and simulation of the cure profiles obtained from the DSC measurements in the chemically controlled region. These varied from simple nth order kinetic models to complicated combinations of nth order and autocatalytic kinetic schemes. The mathematical techniques used to evaluate the parameters of the kinetic models varied from simple linear regression to non-linear regression and peak analysis. The resulting fits were in a good agreement with the experimental results for all the resin systems and for all the experimental conditions used. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 77: 1419–1431, 2000

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