Evolution of viscoelastic behavior of a curing LY5052 epoxy resin in the glassy state

Abstract The aim of this work is to develop a methodology to analyze the influence of the curing history on the viscoelastic storage modulus. Two different experimental approaches are presented exposing the material to various cure temperature and cure time sequences. The evolving viscoelastic properties are characterized using standard Dynamic Mechanical and Thermal Analysis (DMTA) equipment. Therefore, the present study is limited to infinitesimally small strains and linear viscoelasticity only. The methodology is demonstrated using the LY5052 epoxy resin system for its storage modulus E′ in the frequency domain. Results indicate that evolution of thermo-viscoelastic properties could be indeed assumed independent of the cure history for the investigated LY5052. We observe that the shift factor in the reduced time expression for the viscoelastic model examined in this paper is a product of two shift functions, namely the temperature and cure shift functions.