Fast Curing Epoxy Resin Compositions with Ionic Liquid as Additive

What is it about?

Commercially available epoxy resins can be cured in seconds using very small amounts of solvate ionic liquids (SIL)s. This is the first ultrafast rapid curing epoxy resin composition, observed at low levels of 1−5% of SIL in epoxy resin, and the cure rate is enhanced up to 26-fold without compromising the mechanical and thermal properties. Results from this work is a great benefit to the high-volume manufacture of fiber-reinforced composites. Making epoxy thermosets rapidly processable enables enormous benefits, finding applications in a whole variety of transformation methods that exist for traditional glass and metals.

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Photo by Douglas Bagg on Unsplash

Photo by Douglas Bagg on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Herein, we report a simple and effective approach to initiate ultrafast cross-linking reactions in epoxy resins using solvate ionic liquid as the catalytic additive. Rapid curing of epoxy as fast as 5 seconds or below was achieved without any significant changes in other physical properties of the cured thermosets. Typically, epoxy resin takes several minutes to hours to crosslink. This is the fastest cross-linking with epoxy resins ever reported, and still with room in tuning the cross-linking time. Known rapid cure resins in the market set within 3-8 minutes but are commercialized with unknown chemistry. To reap the benefits from using epoxy in large volume commercial production platforms, cure cycle times of less than 1 min must be achieved. In this manuscript we report curing under 5 seconds which is a significant achievement.

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