Investigation on Polyether Sulfone Toughening Epoxy Vitrimer: Curing and Dynamic Properties

Diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A crosslinking with glutaric anhydride is used to form the conventional "covalent adaptive network", polyether sulfone (PES) by coiling and aggregating on the adaptive network is used to significantly increase the uncured resin viscosity for improving the processability of epoxy resin, but inevitably affecting the curing reaction and dynamic transesterification reaction. This study investigates the crucial roles of PES in curing dynamics and stress relaxation behavior. The results indicate that although PES does not directly participate in the crosslinking reaction of polyester-based epoxy vitrimers. Moreover, the isothermal curing studies reveal that the addition of PES can greatly bring forward the reaction rate peak from conversion α = 0.6 to α = 0.2, meaning that the curing mechanism transfers from chemical control to diffusion control. Dynamic property analysis shows that the addition of PES significantly accelerates stress relaxation, especially at lower temperatures, leading to low viscous flow activation energy E_τ and relatively insensitive stress relaxation behavior to temperature. Introducing PES into vitrimer resin greatly improves crosslinking density (2.31 × 10⁴ mol m^- ³), enhancing glass transition temperature (82.68 °C), tensile strength (68.66 MPa), and fracture toughness (6.25%). Additionally, the modified vitrimer resin exhibits satisfying shape memory performance and reprocessing capability.