Thermally stable epoxy polymers from new tetraglycidyl amine-based resin

A tetraglycidyl amines-based epoxy resin, namely 4-(2-(4-(bis(oxiran-2-ylmethyl)amino)phenoxy)ethoxy)-N,N-bis(oxiran-2-ylmethyl)benzenamine (TGAE), was synthesized and characterized by FTIR, .sup.1H and .sup.13C NMR spectral analysis. The synthesized epoxy resin was analyzed by gel permeation chromatography, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The TGAE was further blended with diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A (DER-332) in various proportions (0-20%) and cured with two diamines 4-(4-aminobenzyl)benzenamine (MDA) and Jeffamine to achieve two types of epoxy polymers. All the epoxy-amine systems were characterized by the FTIR spectral analysis. Thermal properties of synthesized polymers were evaluated by DSC and TGA, which revealed that our synthesized epoxy-amine blends are an excellent combination of flexible methylene segments and rigid tetrafunctional epoxy resin. MDA-based systems are processable and offer thermal properties comparable to reported TGDDM-imidazole non-processable system. The Jeffamine-based systems showed Tg's at same working temperature range as that of pure systems. However, the presence of a tetrafunctional epoxy will render additional adhesive properties to the coating prepared by our synthesized systems.