Abstract
Carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) attracts attention with increasing the requirement to reduce the weight of automobiles. The important issue for applying CFRP widely to mass-produced cars is to realize the high productivity equal to the conventional steel material. We focused to resin transfer molding (RTM) process, and aimed to reduce the molding cycle time of RTM within 10 min. At the mold temperature, the resin should not react for a while and maintain the fluidity at the injection process, and then stiffen immediately to the glass state to demold without deformation. In this paper, we investigated to design the epoxy resin system which could balance the long flow time and the short cure time by using the dielectric analysis. On the basis of reaction kinetics, we confirmed the advantage of an anionic polymerization system to balance them compared with the conventional amine curing system. And we achieved the target by applying an alcohol for chain transfer reaction and an acid anhydride for alternating copolymerization respectively. In addition, we succeeded in molding the large-scale CFRP of the anionic polymerization resin system by RTM in 10 minutes.
