High‐performance thermosets with tailored properties derived frommulti‐armstared vanillin and carbon fiber composites

Abstract

Vanillin, a rigid compound can be separated from lignin, is a promising sustainable candidate for industrial and high performance polymers, while synthesis of hexa-epoxies is challenging. Meanwhile, carbon fiber reinforced biobased polymers combining high performance are more difficult to be achieved because of the contradictions of liquidity and high rigidity in the polymer structure and performance. In this paper, a novel hexa-epoxy functionalized bio-based epoxy resin (HPVIGEP) with a multi-arm star structure, which simultaneously reduced the viscosity and improved thermo-mechanical properties. The rheological behavior analysis results of HPVIGEP indicated that the viscosity was 3406.9 mPaÁs at 25 C, which dramatically decreased by 75.8% compared to DGEBA (14,096 mPaÁs), leading to excellent processability and adaptability. At the same time, the study on mechanical properties revealed that the cured HPVIGEP manifested 30.6%, 33.7% and 49.0% in higher tensile strength, tensile modulus and storage modulus (30 C) than of cured commercial epoxy, respectively. The tensile strength and flexural strength of carbon fiber composites which were applied HPVIGEP were increased by 9.3% and 10.9%, respectively. In a word, this work provides the promise for the application of environmentally friendly bio-based composite materials.

High Temperature Composites From Renewable Resources: A Perspective on Current Technological Challenges for the Manufacturing of Non-Oil Based High Char Yield Matrices and Carbon Fibers

“…Phenolic resins from biomasses have been indeed developed and studied extensively in recent decades, but the search for biobased alternative to standard phenolic in the specific sector of high charring matrices is still ongoing (Loganathan et al, 2021), even though it is predictable that the properties of resin synthesized from bioresources are lower than the raw material derived from oil (Ipakchi et al, 2020;Ma et al, 2020;Guo et al, 2021;Gruber et al, 2021). One example of nanofiller reinforced phenolic composites for ablative purposes comes from the paper of Ma et al, where the authors found that the addition of graphene oxide or graphitic carbon nitride (Figure 8C) (Ma et al, 2019) increased the char yield graphitization level during ablation, helping heat dissipation and thereby increasing the ablation resistance.…”