Toward a new thermoplastic epoxy-based system

Thermoplastic composites allows attractive advantages over their thermosetting counterparts like a higher toughness, faster and more flexible manufacturing and intrinsic recyclability. Thermoplastic composite parts, nevertheless, are limited in size and thickness by traditional melt processing. As an alternative, reactive processing of textile fibre-reinforced thermoplastics is a very attractive theme. Reactive processing systems stand as the next breakthrough of advanced composite development and materials research investigations due to their inherent synergy between thermoplastic characteristic performance and thermosetting manufacturing processes, representing an high technological hybrid solution for many industrial sectors. The idea of produce epoxy-based reactive systems which exhibit a thermoplastic behavior is not far away, due to consolidated know-how on reactive processing of thermosetting epoxy resins. In this work, an epoxy-based system which can be reactively processed preserving the advantages of a thermoplastic system was investigated and characterized. Applications in polymer/carbon nanotubes composites and fiber reinforced composites were analyzed and focused.