Sensing the Thermal Aging of Epoxy Alumina Nano-Composites Using Electric Modulus

In this contribution, a novel technique to accurately sense the thermal aging of the epoxy alumina nano-composites employing complex electric modulus is proposed. To sense the thermal ageing of epoxy nano-composites accurately, knowledge of relaxation behavior is necessary. However, relaxation behavior cannot be understood completely due to electrode polarization and charge transport effects at high temperatures and at low frequencies. To overcome this problem, electric modulus which is defined as the inverse of the complex permittivity, is being proposed in this study to analyze the aging behavior of the epoxy alumina nano-composites quantitatively. For this purpose, three epoxy resin samples mixed with alumina (Al
₂
O
₃
) nano-fillers with different filler concentrations were prepared and thermal aging of the same samples was done for 100 hours, 200 hours, 300 hours and 400 hours, respectively. For each sample, the complex dielectric modulus (M*( ω)) was computed using frequency domain spectroscopy measurement to observe their frequency dependent relaxation behaviors. The variation of the real (M
^'
( ω)) and imaginary (M
^''
( ω)) part of ( M*( ω)) over the frequency range from 1 mHz to 10 kHz was further fitted using Cole-Cole (C-C) model. From the nature of variation of M
^''
( ω) spectrum and the fitting parameters of the C-C model, two characteristic parameters were extracted to quantitatively describe the thermal aging of the epoxy nano-composite samples. Investigations revealed that the extracted parameters can be accurately used to sense the aging condition of the epoxy nano-composites.