Development of low temperature curing polyimides with quinoline

Polyimide (PI) is a kind of high-performance polymer with excellent thermal stability and good mechanical, electrical and chemical properties which has been widely employed in semiconductor industry. However, the imidization of PI usually operated at high temperature (about 350 °C), damages would be produced easily in the process. Therefore, it is of great practical significance to study the imidization reaction of PI at low temperature. In this paper, the imidization process of PAA and the catalyst of quinoline has been studied which proved high imidization of 99.6% at 200 °C. Besides, the Young's modulus is as large as 3.5 GPa and the elongation at break is more than 50% with high tensile strength about 400 MPa. Meanwhile, the weight loss 5% temperature (T
₅
) is more than 490 °C and the glass transition temperature (T
_g
) is higher than 350 °C. The effects of quinoline content on the thermal and mechanical properties of polyimide were discussed. The developed low temperature curing PI is expected to be applied in flexible OLED and electronic packaging.