Rapid and non-destructive quality verification of epoxy resin product using ATR-FTIR spectroscopy coupled with chemometric methods

Abstract

Epoxy resin is the most commonly used thermosetting resin in various domains. Nevertheless, in industrial production, manual operations are still the mainstream in the weighing and mixing procedures of resin raw materials, where operating errors are inevitable, resulting in the performance of the final product uncontrollable. This paper presented a novel method by attenuated total reflection-Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy for rapid and non-destructive quality verification of epoxy resin prepolymers, in which the principal component analysis (PCA) and the soft independent modeling of class analogy (SIMCA) are applied to improve the detection capability of abnormal products. Eleven abnormal samples of 83 epoxy resin prepolymers are screened out by the SIMCA method, which is 84.6% in agreement with the traditional differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) testing results. It indicates that ATR-FTIR in tandem with the SIMCA method can be used as an alternative approach for rapid quality verification of resin systems in the industry.