Alternative reactive solvent for ABB products

Sammanfattning: The epoxy resin mixture is used for wet filament winding load carrying and electrically insulating tubes for high voltage applications. The cured tubes are key parts of the final products which are subject to qualification. The safe function of the products generally depends on low moisture content. Visual inspection is also an important part of the quality inspection which requires some degree of transparency of the cured tubes. To prepare for future material modifications ABB wishes to evaluate the curing characteristics of some recently developed epoxy/hardener systems. The epoxy resin with the formulation E1/H1 is used as reference. Another type of base epoxy resin E2 and toughened epoxy resin E1 (E1T) are included in the study. Three alternative hardeners H2, H3, and H4 were evaluated. This project is to evaluate different alternative epoxy resin formulations that are promising to be used in the ABB products in the future. These alternative epoxy resin formulations and the reference epoxy resin with the formation E1/H1 were prepared to be compared and evaluated in terms of thermal properties, i.e., glass temperature (Tg), the heat of curing and color of cured epoxy resins. The epoxy resins with alternative formulations which shown relative high Tg values were selected to carry out other analysis, ie., mixing ration optimization, the influence of dissolved water on Tg values, degree of curing and water absorption behavior.