Rheological behavior of the epoxy/thermoplastic blends during the reaction induced phase separation

The correlation between rheological behavior and time evolution of the phase separation patterns was investigated in the epoxy/thermoplastic blends. Before and during the induction period of phase separation, the storage and loss modulus initially increased with epoxy curing reaction and the concentration fluctuation. At the late stage of phase separation, the modulus values also increased and showed a sharp enhancement around the epoxy gel point. However, the time evolution during the reaction induced phase separation process differed a lot at various thermoplastic (TP) concentrations. At the low TP concentrations, the rheological parameters decreased with the coarsening of sea-island structure. At the high TP concentrations, the TP-rich continuous structures initially formed and maintained until the end, resulting in a continuous increase for the rheological characters. At middle TP concentrations, formation and evolution of the three-layered structure displayed a complicated rheological behavior. It was found that the storage modulus quickly increased, reached a vertex, then rapidly decreased, reached a minimum, and increased again afterwards. Although the rheological behaviors were almost phenomenologically similar as that in the normal dynamically symmetric system, driving force for the variation was fundamentally different. Especially for the case of middle TP concentrations, the behavior of the holistic volume shrinking of the slow dynamic TP-rich network and the flowing out of the fast dynamic epoxy-rich phase from the network during this period, as radically transformed the nature of the matrix from an elastic network to a macro-phase separated layer structure and caused the dramatic change of the rheological behaviors.