Experimental modeling of the cure kinetics of an epoxy-hexaanhydro-4-methylphthalicanhydride (MHHPA) system

The DEBGA-MHHPA epoxy system has found increasing applications in microelectronics packaging for which the ability to understand and model the cure kinetics mechanism accurately is crucial. The present paper reports on the work carried out to elucidate an accurate cure kinetics model for the DEBGA-MHHPA epoxy system, using both the isothermal and non-isothermal DSC methods. The results indicates that both the Kissinger and Ozawa's methods for calculating the activation energy value gave fairly close results of 71.6 and 74.7 kJ/mol, respectively. A autocatalytic model with a total order of reaction of about 2.5 was successfully used to model the process. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.