Cure monitoring of infusion resins by broadband dielectric spectroscopy (BDS)

Broadband Dielectric Spectroscopy (BDS) has been employed to monitor the curing of two epoxy resins used for infusion based manufacturing processes. For this purpose, dielectric spectra of the resins in a frequency range from 1106 Hz have been recorded continuously during isothermal storage of samples at various curing temperatures (50, 70 and 90°C). The time dependence of fit parameters obtained from analysis of the dielectric loss eps'' according to the Havriliak-Negami (HN) function [1,2] is discussed and compared with kinetic simulations of the curing process based on measurements by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC)