Accelerated curing of adhesives using inductively heated Curie particles

Abstract

The present thesis summarises my research on accelerated curing of adhesives, and adhesively bonded connections, using inductively heated Curie-particles (CP). Induction heating is used as a rapid and versatile heating technique. Curie particles have been considered because of their property to generate heat up to their corresponding Curie temperature, if subjected to an electromagnetic field (EMF), but not beyond. The combination of induction heating and CP aimed at resulting in an accelerated curing process completely freed of the constraints of process control as usual for adhesively bonded joints. In the first part of my thesis, I describe the conceptual and technical background necessary to understand the core issues of my research, and detail its scientific objectives. The second part includes all necessary information regarding the materials used and methods applied for the accelerated curing experiments. In the third part, my eight peer-reviewed accepted publications that constitute the core of my thesis are summarised. In the next, fourth, part, the achievements of the scientif work were assessed, a summary and an outlook conclude the thesis. Finally, the fifth part includes my curriculum vitæ and other personal information. During the research, I maintained a coherence between the individual chapters represented by the individual publications by systematically using the same adhesives and CP so to incrementally increase the level of investigation complexity based upon a solid background. The investigations started on the level of curing kinetics of the considered two-component (2K) structural adhesives in order to highlight influences of the process thereof. Afterwards, experimental investigations were scaled up to the level of bulk adhesive properties (most importantly strength and stiffness), over small-scale joints up to large bonded applications. In addition, two publications focus on the development and application of a numerical model to predict heating- and curing-related aspects of the technique to design more predictable and practitioneer-friendly CP-curing processes. Finally, CP were also considered to cure adhesives starting from low temperatures, in which the polymerisation would not occur at all, thus paving the way for additional application fields for adhesively bonded joints.