Predicting Long-Term Performance of New Vinyl Ester SMC/BMC Resins for Under-the-Hood Applications Via Short-TermThermal Testing

Continuously improving the physical and thermal properties of under-the-hood composite materials is a challenging requirement facing today's resin manufacturer. Providing meaningful data, so that the best material is selected for each application, is also a challenging task. Long-term performance data is typically unavailable due to time and economic constraints. Traditional short-term data, such as static physical properties, cannot predict the performance of these materials with time, under load, and/or in harsh chemical and thermal environments. This paper illustrates how short-term dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) testing can simulate long term behavior of vinyl ester resin SMC materials. In particular, it will be shown how creep characteristics, typically requiring lengthy, expensive testing, can be achieved with the DMA by acquiring data over relatively short (thirty minute) time intervals and applying time-temperature superpositioning to make long-term performance predictions.