Microwave processing of materials has the potential to deliver several major advantages over conventional thermal processing. One of these is an decrease in the time necessary for manufacture since the microwave energy is absorbed throughout the body of the material rather than relying on thermal conduction and convection. Another potential advantage is that the power is directed to the sample, this together with the decrease in processing time leads to lower energy being consumed. One question which needs to be addressed in the case of polymer composites is whether microwave processed materials are of as good quality as the thermally processed ones. In this work the interfacial properties of model Kevlar fibre reinforced epoxy composites post-cured by both conventional and microwave heating have been examined. Raman spectroscopy was employed to measure the fibre strain distributions along embedded fibres and from this information the interfacial shear stress distribution was calculated. The results show that the interfacial shear strengths and critical lengths of the microwave post-cured composites are comparable to those for thermally post-cured ones. This is potentially of interest in the commercial manufacture of composites since the process could be considerably shortened by the use of microwave post-curing leading to lower cycle times and costs without any deterioration in the interfacial properties of the composites
