Thermal properties and fracture toughness of a liquid-crystalline epoxy resin cured with an aromatic diamine crosslinker having a mesogenic group

A mesogenic-type curing agent was synthesized to introduce a mesogenic group not only into epoxy resin backbones but also into the crosslink units. In the mesogenic curing agent system, the domain size became larger, and the network arrangement in each domain existed to a greater extent than that in a system cured with the ordinary diamine curing system according to the evidence from polarized optical micrographs and polarized Fourier transform infrared mapping measurements. Moreover, the fracture toughness of the system was considerably improved. (c) 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.