Whiskers Modified Cyanate Ester Resin Composite

With the development of advanced materials, the whisker-reinforced polymers are deeply researched and widely used in many fields. As a new thermosetting matrix, Cyanate esters (CEs) form a family of new generation thermosetting resins whose performance characteristics make them attractive competitors to many current commercial polymer materials for such applications. The chemistry and technology of CEs are relatively new and continue to evolve and attract researchers. The CEs are gifted with many attractive physical, electrical, thermal, and processing properties required an ideal matrix resin. These properties are further tunable through backbone structure and by blending with other polymer systems. Cyanate esters possess good toughness, inherent in the symmetric triazine linked through the ether linkage. However, further improvement in toughness would be demanded for certain critical applications which could be achieved by blending the CEs with various functional and non-functional additives, such as modification by epoxy resin (EP) or bismaleimide resin (BMI). To use whisker is a novel idea. In this paper, the modification of CE by aluminum borate whisker, potassium titanate whisker or calcium sulphate whisker have been carried out.The coupling agent—KH550 is selected to treat the three kind of whiskersas a surface treating agent. Especially, a comparison between untreated aluminum borate whisker and treated one as an example is studied. It can be concluded from the result that the matrix has good wetting to the treated whisker by KH550, at the same time, the mechanics property of CE/ whisker system is also improved.For the three different whiskers modifying CE systems, the effects of various content and the type of whisker on the properties of modification system have been studied. It shows that all modification systems have a optimize whisker content, and if the content is equal, aluminum borate whisker modification system shows the best effect.