Estimation of Electron Trap in Hydrocarbon-Based Thermosetting Resin / Fullerene Composite by Computational Science

The authors have reported that dielectric breakdown strength improves by 34% by uniformly dispersing 0.6 wt% fullerene in epoxy resin. However, it is not easy to uniformly disperse fullerene in a polar epoxy resin. On the other hand, hydrocarbon-based thermosetting resin (HTR: Hydrocarbon¬based thermosetting resin) has more excellent mechanical and electrical characteristics than epoxy resin, and is almost nonpolar. Accordingly, HTR is expected to have high affinity with the nonpolar fullerene. In this paper, quantum chemistry calculations are performed on HTR/fullerene (C₆₀) composites to estimate the electron trap depth from the electronic state density. As a result, it is found that the electron trap depth of the epoxy/fullerene composite and HTR/C₆₀ are calculated as 3.0 and 3.7 eV, respectively. The increase in the electron trap depth suggests that the addition of fullerene to HTR can suppress acceleration of high energy electron leading to increase in the dielectric breakdown strength.