Thermal stability, thermal decomposition and mechanism analysis of cycloaliphatic epoxy/4,4′-dihydroxydiphenylsulfone/aluminum complexes latent resin systems

The thermal stability of latent resin systems, cycloaliphatic epoxy/4,4′-dihydroxydiphenylsulfone/aluminum complexes, was investigated by dynamic differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) analysis. Experiments were conducted under non-isothermal condition in a nitrogen atmosphere at the heating rate of 10, 20, 30 and 40 °C/min, respectively. TG curves showed that, in the temperature range of 25 to 600 °C, the stability of the resin systems could be enhanced by increasing the length of the aliphatic chain in the initiator. Both the Kissinger method and the Ozawa-Flynn-Wall method were employed to calculate activation energies of the decomposition reaction, and the values obtained from the two methods were compared. Moreover, the corresponding reaction mechanism was identified by the Achar differential method and the Coats-Redfern integral method. The experimental results showed that these four methods were reliable and effective to study the kinetics of the thermal decomposition reaction; and the most probable thermal decomposition mechanism of the resin systems we proposed was found to comply with Mampel power law (m=1).