Dielectric cure determination of a thermosetting epoxy composite prepreg

Evaluation of degree of cure (DoC) of a glass reinforced epoxy composite prepreg used for manufacturing of printed circuit board (PCB) is an intensive issue because of its practical importance and cost reduction in industry. Typical techniques such as differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) are destructive and require curing a material during a chosen time, quenching the sample to stop cure before performing analysis. Thus, it is necessary to remove the temperature influence on the determination of DoC. In this study, the feasibility of nondestructive dielectric sensing method as an in situ DoC measuring technique through cure monitoring of prepreg is presented, where a vacuum packing configuration has been established so as for the prepreg to evaluate accurately the DoC in a quenched state at an ambient temperature. The optimal curing condition to get the fully cured state of a prepreg material is determined by the dielectric cure monitoring based on the behavior of ion viscosity. The temperature effect compensated DoC of prepreg is correlated and compared with that evaluated by DSC and FTIR. The correlated DoC with ion viscosity has identified the curing behavior of prepreg by determining cure kinetic parameters. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2017 , 134, 44707.