Improving thermal stability and ablative performance of epoxy resin by constructing epoxy–siloxane hybrid networks

Abstract

Epoxy resin exhibits poor thermal stability, which significantly restricts their application in thermal protection sectors. To solve this problem, siloxane was used to modify epoxy resin by constructing an epoxy–siloxane hybrid network to improve char residue and ablative performance. The results show that the 800 °C char residue of siloxane-modified epoxy resin reached 36.4% in a nitrogen atmosphere and 12.4% in an air atmosphere, representing increases of 98.9% and 726.7% compared with the unmodified counterpart, respectively. The mass ablative rate of the modified epoxy resin was 0.0515 g s⁻¹, which was 55.9% lower than that of pure epoxy resin. This work provides a strategy to improve the thermal stability and ablative performance of epoxy resin, which exhibits a promising application in industrial sectors for thermal protection purposes.