The Physical Properties Analysis of Epoxy Resins Incorporated with Toughening Agents

Abstract

Epoxy resin toughening agents such as core/shell nanoparticles, CTBN epoxy, polyester polyols, and polyurethane have been widely used in order to compensate for the brittleness and improve the impact resistance of the epoxy resin. In this work, a few tougheners mentioned above were individually added into adhesive compositions to observe the effects of physical and mechanical properties. Both flexural strength and flexural modulus were measured with UTM while impact strength was analyzed with Izod impact tester. The obtained results showed that the addition of toughening agents afforded positive performance in terms of flexibility and impact resistance of the cured epoxy resin. Furthermore, DMA experiments suggested that the trends of storage modulus data of each epoxy resin composition coincided with the trends of flexural modulus data. FE-SEM images showed that toughening agents formed circled-shape particles when it was cured in epoxy resin composition at high temperature by phase separation. The existence of particles in the cured samples explains why epoxy resin with toughener has higher impact resistance.