New Epoxy Resin 250°F/120°C without Oven or Autoclave

Almost resin cure slowly or need heat. Now, NONA Composites will unveil its new R404/H18 resin system at CAMX 2015.  This new epoxy resin enables room temperature infusion or filament winding followed by a relatively fast (≈ 2-hr) cure without adding any heat (i.e., no oven no autoclave) or an even faster (15-30 min) heat-added cure (250°F/120°C) with no post-cure, to enable faster, larger, and more flexible composite processing for filament wound pressure vessels, marine structures, industrial composites, and even some lower-temperature aerospace composites.

New NONA R404/H18 epoxy resin offers curing and tooling flexibility for a wide range of structures,fiberglass chopped strand mat including large marine infusions and filament wound tanks for energy applications. 

A key application of this new system will be in filament wound tanks for compressed natural gas (CNG) storage and other alternative energy markets. In order to measure the material’s performance beyond standard testing, NONA Composites worked with HyPerComp Engineering Inc. to filament wind and burst test a small composite overwrapped pressure vessel.  An aluminum liner overwrapped with T700 carbon fiber and NONA R404/H18 resin was cured using a 2-hr heat-added cure cycle at 250°F/120°C but without post-cure. (Heat was added due to the aluminum liner heat sink.) The vessel was then burst according to standard in-house HyPerComp Engineering procedures.  The comparison of delivered fiber strength to that predicted by HyPerComp's computer finite element analysis (FEA) was 102%, demonstrating its successful performance in this standard test setup.  The next step is to build and burst test the same tank using a 15-min heated cure, as NONA Composites continues working with HyPerComp Engineering to evaluate R404/H18 epoxy’s performance with fiberglass-based filament wound vessels.

In addition to the work in filament wound structures, NONA Composites is demonstrating its R404/H18 epoxy in a 500 ft2 infused hybrid fiberglass and carbon structure. The company will showcase this part production in 2016 as a demonstration of the ability to fabricate larger components more rapidly without an oven or added heat.