Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Vol.59, No.11, 5133-5141, 2020
Modeling Highly Cross-Linked Epoxy Resins in Solvents of Different Polarities with PC-SAFT
The solvent uptake in equilibrium of a highly cross-linked epoxy o-cresol novolac resin in water, isopropanol, and heptane was experimentally measured and modeled with the perturbed-chain statistical association fluid theory (PC-SAFT) equation of state. As suggested in the literature, PC-SAFT was combined with a network term, which takes additional elastic forces into account. The model parameters of the epoxy resin were generated by fitting them to the measured solvent uptake in pure substances and to the density of the epoxy resin, which provided a very good agreement with the experimental data. Furthermore, the solvent uptake in the mixtures isopropanol/water and isopropanol/heptane was predicted in very good agreement to the experimental data. For the first time, a thermodynamic model was developed to calculate the solvent uptake in an epoxy resin.