Influence of inorganic fillers on chemico-physical properties of epoxy-based materials

In the marine field epoxy-based materials are currently used to insulate the surface of the vessels, improve their surface finish and prepare it for the next painting treatments. A wide variety of fillers have been added to the epoxy resins in order to achieve an improvement of some properties, such as lightness, thermical insulation, hardness/tenderness of the surface. In this paper new hollow glass microspheres and Carbon NanoTubes (CNTs) were added to an epoxy matrix to obtain some new, different epoxy composites to compare to a traditional one. Their surface properties, cure behaviors, glass transition temperature, tensile strength and flexural strength were studied. The different hollow glass microspheres-filled composites showed similar behaviour, only with slight modifications of their final mechanical properties. On the other hand, the mechanical properties of the CNTs-filled composites were significantly different from those of neat epoxy resins. This variation could be understood on the analysis of the different interfacial interaction between the filler and the epoxy matrix in the composite.