Photothermal monitoring of curing in multilayered systems

In this work the process of a curing layer buried inside two external layers is monitored in real time using photothermal radiometry. The curing materials studied are two adhesives and a UV curing resin. It is shown that the curing process can be observed in all the cases as an increase in the thermal diffusion coefficient of the buried sample. It is shown that the kinetic behavior of the adhe- sives is very similar, probably due to the fact that evaporation is the main mechanism that generates the curing contrary to what happens in the UV curing resin where the light flux is the determining factor that induces the polymerization.