Effect of Cure State on Stress Relaxation in 3501-6 Epoxy Resin

Little experimental work has been done to characterize how the viscoelastic properties of composite material matrix resins develop during cure. In this paper, the results of a series of creep tests carried out on 3501–6 epoxy resin, a common epoxy matrix material for graphite/epoxy composites, at several different cure states is reported. Beam specimens were isothermally cured at increasing cure temperatures to obtain a range of degrees of cure from 0.66 to 0.99. These specimens were then tested in three-point bending to obtain creep compliance over a wide temperature range. The master curves and shift functions for each degree of cure case were obtained by time-temperature superposition. A numerical technique and direct inversion were used to calculate the stress relaxation modulus master curves from the creep compliance master curves. Direct inversion was shown to be adequate for fully cured specimens, however it underpredicts the relaxation modulus and the transition for partially cured specimens. Correlations with experimental stress relaxation data from Kim and White (1996) showed that reasonably accurate results can be obtained by creep testing followed by numerical conversion using the Hopkins-Hamming method.