Effect of tertiary amine accelerators with different substituents on curing kinetics and reactivity of epoxy/dicyandiamide system

Non-isothermal Differential Scanning Calorimetry and gel time measurements were employed to study the effects of four different tertiary amine accelerators with different molecular structure and substituents on the curing behavior and reactivity of epoxy/dicyandiamide (DICY) system. Results showed that the acceleration behavior depends on three factors: the bulkiness, the number of nitrogen atoms in molecular structure and the electron density of accelerator. Among these, the former two factors demonstrated stronger effect. The results of model fitting kinetic demonstrated that Å esták-Berggren model can well simulate the reaction rates especially for the samples accelerated by 2,4,6-tris(dimethylaminomethyl)-phenol and (Dimethylaminomethyl)phenol. The activation energy projected by Flynn-Wall-Ozawa and Kissinger-Akahira-Sunose methods exposed different amounts for each accelerator while both models revealed similar trends. Moreover, 1-methylimidazol-accelerated samples showed shortest storage life and gel time mainly due to the presence of two nitrogen atoms in a compact structure of accelerator.