Thermo-mechanical characterization of carbon fiber composites with different epoxy resin systems

Abstract The composite materials have found widespread applications in aircraft, automobiles, sports, space, and defence industries. Understanding the cure behavior as well as resulted thermo-mechanical properties of a thermosetting system are essential in the development and optimization of composite fabrication processes. In this paper, HCU200/A45 carbon fiber prepreg along with HinpoxyC, HinpoxyVB, ARL135 and ARL136 epoxy resin systems with suitable hardeners are used for the development of composites and their characterization. The DMA, isothermal and dynamic modes of DSC, Kissinger equation and the universal tensile test are used to determine various thermo-mechanical properties of composites namely glass transition temperature, heat of reaction, degree of cure, activation energy, pre-exponential factor and tensile strength. The simple additive weighting method is applied to compare different epoxy resin systems and it is found that the overall thermo-mechanical properties for ARL136 resin system are within 5% variation of the same properties measured for the prepreg system.