With the deepening of near-Earth space exploration, the extreme low-temperature environment faced by aerospace vehicles poses severe challenges to materials. As core components of rockets, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen storage tanks' lightweight directly determines launch efficiency. Epoxy resin-based composites have become the ideal alternative to traditional metals due to their ability to reduce weight by over 30%. However, conventional epoxy resins are prone to cracking and debonding in extreme low temperatures, making balancing low-temperature toughness and high-temperature modulus an industry-wide problem. Research teams have developed two core toughening paths. In heterogeneous toughening, Nanjing University modified epoxy resin with ATBN, achieving an elongation at break of 30.8%; German researchers used polysiloxane-containing block copolymer modifiers, enabling the resin to inhibit crack propagation even at -196℃. Homogeneous toughening achieves breakthroughs at the molecular level: the impact strength of epoxy resin modified with polyetheramine D-230 reaches 23.32kJ/m² at 77K, and the elastic modulus increases by 770 times after introducing sacrificial bonds. In the future, the material will continue to upgrade through three directions: optimizing topological structure via computer simulation, constructing dynamic crosslinking mechanisms, and improving interface performance. From aerospace launch to deep-sea exploration, the breakthrough of low-temperature resistant and tough epoxy resin is constantly expanding the boundaries of human exploration of extreme environments, and is expected to shine in more high-end manufacturing fields in the future.

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