Studies on Cure Kinetics of a Novel Imidazole Derivative Curing Agent for Epoxy Resin

Abstract

We used phenyl glycidyl ether (PGE) to modify 2-methylimidazole (2MI) and obtained a novel imidazole derivative named as 2MI-g-PGE. FTIR spectroscopy and 1H NMR spectroscopy have been used to characterize the chemical structure of 2MI-g-PGE. The curing kinetic of diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A (DGEBA) with 2MI-g-PGE as curing agent was studied by dynamic differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) technique. Dynamic DSC scans indicated that 2MI-g-PGE was an effective curing agent of epoxy resin. Both Kissinger method and Ozawa method were adopted to calculate the activation energy (Ea) of DGEBA/2MI-g-PGE system and the values were 74.23kJ/mol and 76.58kJ/mol respectively. By using Crane and Kissinger equations, the characteristic parameters of the curing kinetics including the order of reaction (n) and the pre-exponential factor (A) of DGEBA/2MI-g-PGE system were calculated to be 0.92 and 2.38×1012s-1 respectively.