Study of the degradation of a thermoset system using TGA and modulated TGA

The degradation of the epoxy system diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A (this epoxy is also named DGEBA (n = 0), where n indicates the number of structural units inside the molecule) cured with hardener metaxylilene diamine (m-XDA) was studied on a dynamic basis using TGA and modulated TGA techniques under a nitrogen atmosphere with 5% O2. We observed that under such atmosphere the degradation process becomes more complex. The experimental results showed that modulated thermogravimetric analysis provides key information on the activation energy values, which are consistent with values found in the literature and others obtained by methods derived from TGA measurements.