Influences of processing conditions on mechanical properties of recycled epoxy-anhydride vitrimers

The chemically crosslinked network structures make epoxies, the most common thermosets, unable or hard to be recycled, causing environmental problems and economic losses. Epoxy-based vitrimers, polymer networks deriving from epoxy resins, can be thermally malleable according to bond exchange reactions (BERs), opening the door to recycle epoxy thermosets. Here a series of experiments were carried out to study the effects of processing conditions (such as particle size distributions, temperature, time, and pressure) on recycling of an epoxy-anhydride vitrimer. Polymer powders from the epoxy-anhydride vitrimer with different size distributions were prepared and characterized, and the influence of particle size on the mechanical performance of recycled epoxy-anhydride vitrimers was investigated by dynamic mechanical analysis and uniaxial tensile test. Experimental results demonstrated that finer polymer powders can increase the contacting surfaces of recycled materials and thus result in high quality of recycled materials. In addition, the influences of other treating parameters, such as temperature, time, and pressure, were also discussed in this study. Adjusting these treating parameters can help the design of an optimized reprocessing procedure to meet practical engineering applications.