An anhydride -cured degradable epoxy insulating material exhibiting recyclability, reusability, and excellent electrical performance

Abstract

Anhydride-cured epoxy is a common insulating material used in electrical equipment, but recycling it effectively is difficult, which results in the overall abandonment of the equipment after decommissioning and serious environmental pollution. In order to make anhydride cured epoxy degradable while maintaining its electrical performance, we synthesized a high-performance epoxy insulating material that can be recycled and reused using triethanolamine as a transesterification catalyst co-accelerator. Results show that the new epoxy has the lowest dielectric loss of 0.0012, the highest breakdown strength of 42.26 kV mm⁻¹, and the highest tensile strength of 93.7 MPa. The degradable epoxy can be recovered via mechanical hot pressing and regenerated through chemical degradation. Degradation products can be directly used as curing accelerators to complete the re-preparation of the insulating material. Even after recovery, the properties of the epoxy resin meet the application requirements of insulating materials.