Liquid rubber is a common filler introduced to epoxy resin to improve its toughness for electrical insulation and electronic packaging applications. The improvement of toughness by adding liquid rubber to epoxy resin leads to the variation of its dielectric properties and relaxation behaviors and it has not been systematically studied yet. In this paper, four kinds of liquid rubber with different polarity were selected and the corresponding epoxy/liquid rubber composites have been prepared. By analyzing the temperature and frequency dependence of dielectric spectra, we found that a lower relative dielectric constant and dielectric loss of the epoxy/liquid rubber composites could be achieved by reducing the polarity of liquid rubber filler. These results also confirm that the polarity of liquid rubber plays a critical role in determining the α transition relaxation strength of rubber molecules at about -50 °C, as well as the relaxation time of interfacial polarization. In addition, the conductivity of rubber phase with different polarity were investigated by studying the apparent activation energy of interfacial polarization calculated from the Arrhenius plot. This study can provide a theoretical basis for designing high-performance epoxy/liquid rubber composite insulating materials for industrial use.
Keywords: epoxy resin; interfacial polarization; liquid rubber; polarity.