6. Characterisation of Viscoelastic Material Properties During Curing Processes

The present contribution is toward systematic characterisation of the thermo-viscoelastic properties of a curing epoxy resin system. Characterising the viscoelastic solid behaviour is performed using a dynamic mechanical analyser. The aim of this work is to investigate the dependence of the viscoelastic response on time, temperature and degree of cure and to derive a model that covers the dependency of the relaxation modulus on all three factors and also to investigate how various factors would influence each other in the overall evolution of the relaxation modulus. In particular, we investigate the linearity between the three factors above. To summarize, the results indicate that these three parameters indeed obey a linear relationship.