The effect of thermo-oxidation on the mechanical behaviour of polymer epoxy materials

This paper focuses on the employment of instrumented Ultra-Micro Indentation (UMI) and Confocal Interferometric Microscopy (CIM) for investigating the effect of thermo-oxidation on the local mechanical behaviour of two polymer materials. The UMI curves give good indication of the local short-time behaviour, while the CIM observation of the indentation prints and their recovery during time provides some information about the long-time behaviour. For both studied epoxy resins, this experimental approach reveals significant modification of the local mechanical behaviour with oxidation level. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.