Use of reactive oligomer to improve fracture resistance of epoxy used in medical applications and GRP pipelines

摘要

Epoxy is used as the polymeric matrix material in many medical and pipeline applications. As some examples this polymer is applied in fabrication of prostheses, dental applications, scaffolds, manufacturing glass reinforced pipelines (GRP) etc. Herein, the toughness improvement of an epoxy resin was investigated systematically. For this purpose, we have utilized vinyl-terminated butadiene acrylonitrile (VTBN) reactive oligomer that is known as a toughening agent for epoxy-based thermoset polymers. In order to evaluate the fracture resistance of the final composition, we have used several mechanical tests i.e. Fracture toughness test, Impact resistance test and unidirectional compression test. Moreover, in order to interpret the mechanical test data, damaged surfaces of fractured samples were investigated using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) techniques. It is found that VTBN improves fracture toughness of the epoxy resin more than twice. However this improvement fails by adding more than 25 VTBN. Moreover the impact strength of epoxy has been substantially improved. This is attributed to the high cavitations of VTBN particles. However, these improvements are accompanied with a slight reduction in compressive characteristics of modified samples. This is the result of low modulus of VTBN. © IDOSI Publications, 2012.