ACCELERATED TESTING | MATERIALS
Speeding up the path to material insight
Extending lifetime expectations and shortening product development cycles make accelerated testing an increasingly- needed materials evaluation tool. Chris Saunders learns more
Accelerated testing plays a pivotal role in assessing the performance, durability, and reliability of engineered plastics and compounds, allowing researchers and engineers to rapidly gather data and to expose potential flaws or weaknesses. As demand for materials with enhanced properties grows, accelerated testing techniques are evolving to provide invaluable insight into the behaviour of plastics under extreme conditions. Furthermore, as sustainability gains prominence, accelerated testing is being used to evaluate the long-term effects of environmental factors, which ultimately helps in designing more sustainable materials that retain their performance for longer. The lifetimes required of many plastic compo- nents significantly exceeds their development times, so their lifetime performance can only be deter- mined via accelerated tests. And the current trend
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towards longer part lifetimes and shorter part development times makes test acceleration even more critical. In some cases, such as for plastic pipes or sealing membranes for example, proof of lifetime of up to 100 years is often required. Practical considerations, however, mean that even lifetimes a fraction of that length cannot be verified by conven- tional means, and simple extrapolation of measured data is only possible over relatively short periods. The most widely used approach to accelerating testing of plastics involves temperature increases. This shortens the relaxation times of the polymers and speeds up any physical and chemical ageing processes. “As long as the temperature increase does not cause a change in the failure mechanism, the application of the so-called time-temperature superposition principle, at least for engineering purposes, is often possible and has been demon-
Main image: Accelerating availability of plastics materials test data to quantify expected lifetimes is becoming a priority as development cycles shorten
September 2023 | COMPOUNDING WORLD 43
IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK
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