Logo image
Back
Crosslink network rearrangement via reactive encapsulation of solvent in epoxy curing: A combined molecular simulation and experimental study
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Crosslink network rearrangement via reactive encapsulation of solvent in epoxy curing: A combined molecular simulation and experimental study

Changwoon Jang, Majid Sharifi, Giuseppe R Palmese and Cameron F Abrams
Polymer (Guilford), v 55(16), pp 3859-3868
05 Aug 2014
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polymer.2014.06.022

Abstract

Molecular dynamics Cross-linking Epoxy
Encapsulation of solvent during cure is proposed as one way to alter the network topology of crosslinked polymers. We performed all-atom molecular dynamics simulations to study systems comprised of Epon828 epoxy resin and Jeffamine-D400 diamine crosslinkers cured with varying amounts of the inert solvent dichloromethane (0–50 wt%) and then dried and annealed. Densities, glass transition temperatures, and Young's moduli are observed to be insensitive to the initial amount of dichloromethane. These findings were verified by experiment. Simulations also showed that radial distribution functions and dihedral angle distributions were insensitive to the amount of dichloromethane present. However, using Dijkstra's algorithm, we observed that the distribution of minimum path lengths between crosslinks shifts appreciably to larger values as the amount of dichloromethane increases. This suggests that solvent-encapsulated curing can allow for control over network topology without changing crosslink density or intermolecular packing, and the properties derived from it, in highly crosslinked polymers. [Display omitted] •Molecular simulations of curing, annealing/drying of solvent-containing epoxies.•Density, Young's modulus and Tg insensitive to initial solvent content.•Minimal contour lengths in the networks increase with initial solvent content.

Metrics

5 Record Views
29 citations in Web of Science
32 citations in Scopus

Details

InCites Highlights

Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:

Web of Science research areas
Polymer Science
Logo image