Recyclable High-Performance Epoxy-Anhydride Resins with DMP-30 as the Catalyst of Transesterification Reactions

Epoxy-anhydride resins are widely used in engineering fields due to their excellent performance. However, the insolubility and infusibility make the recycling of epoxy resins challenging. The development of degradable epoxy resins with stable covalent networks provides an efficient solution to the recycling of thermosets. In this paper, 2,4,6-tris(dimethylaminomethyl)phenol (DMP-30) is incorporated into the epoxy-glutaric anhydride (GA) system to prepare high-performance epoxy resins that can be recycled below 200 °C at ordinary pressure via ethylene glycol (EG) participated transesterification. The tertiary amine groups in DMP-30 can catalyze the curing reaction of epoxy and anhydride, as well as the transesterification between ester bonds and alcoholic hydroxyl groups. Compared with early recyclable anhydride-cured epoxy resins, the preparation and recycling of diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A (DGEBA)/GA/DMP-30 systems do not need any special catalysts such as TBD, Zn(Ac)₂, etc., which are usually expensive, toxic, and have poor compatibility with other compounds. The resulting resins have glass transition temperatures and strengths similar to those of conventional epoxy resins. The influences of GA content, DMP-30 content, and temperature on the dissolution rate were studied. The decomposed epoxy oligomer (DEO) is further used as a reaction ingredient to prepare new resins. It is found that the DEO can improve the toughness of epoxy resins significantly. This work provides a simple method to prepare readily recyclable epoxy resins, which is of low-cost and easy to implement.