Abstract
Non-isothermal differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) experiments were performed to study the kinetics of the curing process of mixtures of diglycidylether of bisphenol A (DGEBA) and γ-butyrolactone (γ-BL) with ytterbium triflate as an initiator. It can be deduced that the cured material consists of epoxide homopolymers with incorporated poly(ether-ester) unities, which come from the lactone incorporated into the network. The kinetic parameters, obtained using the non-isothermal isoconversional procedure, show not only the importance of the proportion of initiator but also the influence of γ-butyrolactone on the polymerization of DGEBA. The homopolymerization of DGEBA catalyzed by ytterbium triflate has an activation energy of 85.3 kJ mol−1, which decreases to 68.2 kJ mol−1 in the presence of γ-butyrolactone forming copolymers. Analysis from DSC and FTIR data showed that, when the proportion of ytterbium triflate was increased, the reaction process accelerated and the mechanism of the cationic non-linear polymerization named activated monomer (AM) became more evident than the activated chain-end mechanism (ACE). Finally, the activation energies and the pre-exponential factors were determined for both mechanisms.
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