ABSTRACT
This chapter is focused on the employment of different amphiphilic block copolymers for the fabrication of nanostructured thermosetting materials. Immiscible block of this type of block copolymers microphase separated from the thermoset epoxy-based matrices leading to nanostructured thermosetting materials. Moreover, the addition of amphiphilic block copolymer increases the toughness of nanostructured thermosetting materials making them potential candidate as template for dispersion and localization of inorganic and organic nanoentities.
5.1 IntroductionThermosets based on epoxy resin are one of the important classes of thermosetting polymers which show a broad range of application as high-performance materials ensuring excellent adhesion, chemical and heat resistance, good mechanical properties and very good electrical insulating properties as well as high optical transparency. The main drawback of this kind of thermosetting polymers from the point of view of their applications as adhesives, surface coatings and composites matrices for aeronautic or electronic is low fracture toughness. Several different approaches were explored to improve the fracture toughness of epoxy thermosets. However, one of the successful pathways to achieve high improvements on the toughness of these systems is incorporation of homopolymers, both elastomers [1-5] and thermoplastics [5-9], and block copolymers (BCPs) [10-14]. Use of the BCPs not only improves the toughness of thermosetting polymers but also leads to nanostructured thermosets, which can act as templates for dispersion and selective localization of low-molecular-weight organic molecules (azobencen and liquid crystals, which will be described in more details in Chapter 7) or inorganic nanoobjects
