The effects of soft nanoparticles on the curing kinetic and rheological behavior of epoxy nanocomposite

Polystyrene soft nanoparticles (SNPs) are synthetized by intramolecular crosslinking where the synthetized SNPs’ diameter is kept smaller than the diameter of epoxy to reduce the viscosity through non-Einstein like behavior. Then the effect of 1.2nm diameter synthetized SNPs on epoxy crosslinking kinetic is studied by implementing non-isothermal differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). We have used model-free and fitting methods to investigate the kinetic itself and its parameters. We found that the activation energy is lowered by adding SNPs which is due to their viscosity reduction effects. Also the pre-exponential factor is observed to act a little different showing the collision of reacting groups. At the initial stages of the conversion (15%), the pre-exponential factor increased in epoxy/SNP nanocomposite. After more conversion took place, the reduction appeared due to linear growth of epoxy at early stages of the conversion and network growth is triggered at more conversions