NEW EPOXY PREPREG RESIN TECHNOLOGY FOR HIGH VOLUME AUTOMOTIVE APPLICATIONS

摘要

Composite materials offer great weight saving potential to the automotive industry to comply with CO2 emission and fuel economy regulations. For larger production volumes of automotive composite parts the cycle times have been shortened and reached a new level. Hexion has developed a family of fast curing epoxy resin systems that are used already today in liquid molding processes such as RTM, HP-RTM, or LCM with cycle times of 2 minutes and below. Whilst these processes play an increasingly important role, they also require substantial know how and resources to be built up. Compression molding processes are on the other hand already broadly used in high volume manufacturing; however only a very limited number of compression-moldable structural composites materials are available. Hexion has therefore developed a new epoxy prepreg resin technology that is particularly geared to fast compression molding processes. These new snap cure hot melt formulations can be compression molded with cycle times of down to 60 seconds and provide excellent mechanical and thermal mechanical properties making them ideal for structural applications. The glass transition temperatures can be adjusted in a range of 120°C up to 180°C. In addition, the viscosity nature of these formulations allow the prepregs to exhibit controlled flow behavior, which is needed when for example high quality surface exterior panels are to be produced.