## 9 Conclusions  
The prediction of the degree of cure, the associated heat and temperature increase during the curing of a polymer was successfully done using a standard finite element program with the so called \"kinetic triplet\" as input parameters. The kinetic triplet consists of the activation energy, the Arrhenius pre-factor and the kinetic function, which describes the chemical reaction. The three parameters could be obtained with standard DSC equipment. The data were analyzed with the model-free isoconversional method combined with the compensation effect. The same set of parameters allowed prediction of cure behavior over two orders of magnitude of time and at a curing temperature range from room temperature up to 420 K.  
The parameters obtained with this method were checked against DSC data and more importantly, the curing of a large polymer block of 200 \(\times\) 200 \(\times\) 60 mm\({}^{3}\). Agreement between the simulations and measurements for the (DSC) was within a relative error of ca. 10%. Temperature measurements in the large block were accurate within 3 K. The timing of the peak temperatures was predicted within 3 min in the core of the block and 9 min at its edges, while the whole simulation spanned more than 13 h.  
The overall process can be easily applied and can be summarized in the following few steps.  
* Perform a number of dynamic DSC experiments (cure + immediate post cure) to gather the heat flow raw data.
* Subtract the post cure data from the cure data to get the correct baseline and heat of reaction.
* Calculate the kinetic parameters. The paper gives the required equations to determine the total heat(s) of reaction, the activation energy via the isoconversional method, the pre-factor via the compensation effect and the actual kinetic function.
* Said actual kinetic function needs to be compared to existing models or parameterized individually.
* All the gathered information can then be used in a simple finite element simulation with a program of the user's choice.  
Some simplifications were made when describing the parameters characterizing the cure reaction. The simplifications were important to reduce the computational effort and to make the method applicable over a wide range of application cases. Due to the integrating nature of the analysis these simplifications do not reduce the accuracy of the predictions significantly, which was confirmed by good agreement with the experiments.  
[PERSON] conceived, designed and performed the experiments and wrote the software to calculate the results presented in this paper. [PERSON] and [PERSON] analyzed the data and wrote the paper; Rolls Royce Marine materials and instrumentation. Rolls Royce Marine contributed to the funding of the DSC.  
This research was funded by The Research Council of Norway (Project No.: 245809/O70).  
This work is part of the Project \"Novel fuel saving propulsion technologies for offshore and merchant vessels\" with the industrial partner \"Rolls-Royce Marine\". The authors would like to express their thanks for the financial support by The Research Council of Norway. The authors would like to thank [PERSON] for giving practical advice, guidance and providing materials.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest. The founding sponsors had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analysis, or interpretation of data, in the writing of the manuscript, and in the decision to publish the results.