Rubber toughening of thermosets. A system approach
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abstract
The extensive study of toughening brittle epoxy resins by rubber in the past decades has shown that only limited improvement in toughness can be realized at low (<10%) levels of rubber and that resins of high glass transition temperature are less toughenable. The use of soluble rubbers in most of the studies raised the questions of how much of the rubber remained dissolved and what effect the dissolved rubber might have had on the ultimate toughness of the polymers. In this work of a series of insoluble core-shell rubbers was used to toughen standard epoxy resins as well as an experimental cyanate ester. Our results suggest that the cyanate-derived network exhibits a greater degree of toughenability than the epoxy-derived network. Evidence is presented to demonstrate the ability of the cyanate-based network to undergo shear yielding.
