Redefining Epoxy Mold Compound Shelf-Life

How time and temperature affect spiral flow and viscosity, but not shelf-life

When it comes to epox­ies and specif­i­cal­ly epoxy mold­ing com­pounds (EMC), end users often mis­tak­en­ly define the terms “Shelf Life” and “Expi­ra­tion Date” as the same. The term “Shelf Life” has legal impli­ca­tions (specif­i­cal­ly as it con­cerns sup­pli­ers in the auto­mo­tive sup­ply chain), as a manufacturer’s way of end­ing any war­ran­ty on the material’s final prod­uct properties.

We like to argue that epoxy mold com­pounds nev­er tru­ly expire, and if they can still be processed by the equip­ment required to trans­form it, then the final mate­r­i­al prop­er­ties will nev­er be com­pro­mised. Two prop­er­ties that are affect­ed by time and tem­per­a­tures are Spi­ral Flow and vis­cos­i­ty, but these are pro­cess­ing para­me­ter prop­er­ties and not final prod­uct properties.
As such, this paper argues that epoxy mold com­pound man­u­fac­tur­ers should intro­duce the terms “Spi­ral Flow Behav­ior” and “Vis­cos­i­ty Behav­ior” on their prod­ucts’ tech­ni­cal data sheets. These terms more prop­er­ly qual­i­fy the prop­er­ties that are affect­ed by time and temperature.

The term “Shelf-Life” should not be defined by the way man­u­fac­tur­ers’ cur­rent­ly define it, which is that the mate­r­i­al is with­in a spec­i­fied spi­ral flow range. Rather, shelf-life should be rede­fined by the way their cus­tomers use the term – as an expi­ra­tion date after which the man­u­fac­tur­er ends the war­ran­ty of the material’s final prod­uct prop­er­ties. Doing so would both increase the shelf life of the epoxy mold­ing com­pounds and allow end users to be able to use these prod­ucts, even it means they must adjust the equipment’s pro­cess­ing parameters.

Please stay tuned for the next part in this series to explore the behav­iour of epoxy mold­ing compounds.

Please vis­it us at www.caplinq.com to learn more about our whole range of epoxy mold­ing com­pounds (EMC) includ­ing our epoxy mold com­pound for semi­con­duc­tors, fiber­glass-rein­forced epoxy mold­ing com­pounds, and opti­cal­ly clear epoxy mold­ing com­pounds (CMC) for opto­elec­tron­ics. If you have any oth­er ques­tions about how to process and cure epoxy mold­ing com­pounds please feel free to leave a com­ment below or don’t hes­i­tate to con­tact us.