Abstract:
Blending cyanate ester (CE) with epoxy resins offers the possibility to manufacture radiation resistant insulations at a low price compared to pure CE materials. Therefore, it is of special interest to study the influence of the CE content and also the effect of catalyst on the curing behavior of these insulation systems. Here, we present the curing behavior of the CE-epoxy blend system studied by non-isothermal differential scanning calorimetry in combination with Fourier infra red (FTIR) spectroscopy. Effect of amount of catalyst, compositional change, heating rate on the conversion, and enthalpy change were studied. The activation energy (E (a)) and pre-exponential factor (A), rate constant of different blend systems with and without catalyst, were computed from the modified Ozawa and Kissinger model equations using isoconversional methods. Studies suggested that cure-kinetic parameters calculated from both the models are found to be matching. It was observed that the activation energy is less in the case of catalyzed system than the uncatalyzed system. Predicting the cure profile of this resin system is important under a given set of conditions for achieving the desired, controlled polymerization. This is the first report on the studies of the cure-kinetic parameters of the CE-epoxy blend system, and these observations will definitely pave the way for tuning the process parameters and temperature profile for achieving the desired properties of these insulation systems in fusion relevant magnetic winding packs.
