MATERIALS | ACCELERATED TESTING T


Right: TNO believes weathering tests could be used to help reduce microplastic shedding from plastics during service


ple, depolymerisation) will affect the degradation results and extrapola- tion is not reliable, Boersma says.


In another test, high mechanical stress was placed on notched samples of PVC water pipe to accelerate failure due to crack growth. The stress at failure was plotted against time to failure. This plot can be extrapolated to estimate the amount of time before the pipe would be expected to fail, which in this experiment was approxi- mately 50 years. When the durability projects were started, the aim was to identify reliable measurements to predict integrity of products. A new question to be studied, says Boersma, is whether ageing and degradation of polymers affects the level of microplastics in the environment. Boersma says TNO is currently studying whether microplastic formation can be correlated to a decrease in any


T U H


particular mechanical parameters. In a study of unstabilised PP exposed to accelerated outdoor weathering, cracking formed particles that decreased in size over time to less than 10 microns. Although the study did not evaluate microplastics in the environment, Boersma suggests that microplastics formed by cracking can enter the environment when a mechanical force (such as wind and erosion) removes them from the surface. Accelerated testing can


predict service life and products could be removed before they severely degraded.


CLICK ON THE LINKS FOR MORE INFORMATION: � https://eyeappliedoptix.com/ � https://q-lab.com/ � www.atlas-mts.com �www.skz.de � www.tno.nl/en/


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