Abstract
Polymers are a great and very important category of organic compounds that have changed our lifestyle. In the last eighty years, we have used them for the most varied applications, and from the first structural ones we began to investigate their durability, which can be fatal in the successful completion of the application for which the material was designed. Over the last thirty years, the environmental problems related to the disposal of polymers that have completed their lifecycle have begun to arise, and the need to foresee their end of life has become increasingly urgent. In this manuscript, the reliability of the lifetime predictions of polymeric materials is faced with comparing measurements obtained at low temperature with those carried out at high temperatures, in the molten state. The obtained data were treated by a well-established kinetics model and discrepancies were observed in the two different conditions (high and low temperatures), which led to a mismatching between expected and real data. A correction of the data extrapolated from measurements obtained at high temperatures, by using a novel equation which takes into account the induction period (IP) of the degradation process, is proposed. Considerations about the useful parameters, namely initial decomposition temperature (Ti), activation energy of degradation (Ea), and glass-transition temperature (Tg), to be used for making predictions, are also carried out.
Highlights
To realize the great interest on this topic, just put the keyword “lifetime prediction” in the Scopus search engine
A long-term experiment at a temperature, 270 ◦ C, largely lower than the melting ones was carried out aiming to correlate data collected in these conditions with those obtained by short-term experiments performed at temperatures near the melting one
The different behavior observed for polymer degradation below melting and above it, in the molten state, had the consequence that, when we tried to insert the value obtained at low temperature into the kinetic equations obtained at a higher temperature with short-time experiments, a marked deviation of linearity was observed [28]
Summary
To realize the great interest on this topic, just put the keyword “lifetime prediction” in the Scopus search engine. We can observe an exponential growth of scientific works concerning the lifetime prediction (Figure 1). It is changing from an annual average of fifty manuscripts in the seventy-eighty, at the present day, to an annual average of eight hundred manuscripts, with an increase of 1500 percent. It is right to remark that in the same period there has been an overall increase in scientific publications, if we repeat the same operation by entering two other very common search terms, such as “glass transition” or “calorimetry”, a remarkable growth can obviously be observed, but that does not reach even half from publications relating to “lifetime prediction”.
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