Practical Guide to the Assessment of the Useful Life of Plastics

After price and delivery time, the most frequently asked question about a product is ‘How long will it last?’ Lifetime expectancy is often many years, the service conditions may be complex, and there is a scarcity of definitive data on durability. The situation is complicated by the fact that there are a vast number of degradation agents, service conditions, properties of importance and different plastics.

There are many inherent difficulties in designing durability tests. In many cases, the time scale involved is such that accelerated test conditions are essential. Whilst large amounts of durability data are generated by accelerated methods, much of it is only useful for quality control purposes and relatively little has been validated as being realistically capable of representing service.

Most assessments of the lifetime of plastics are made by considering some measure of performance, such as impact strength, and specifying some lower limit for the property, which is taken as the end point. Lifetime is not necessarily measured in time. For example, for some products it will be thought of as the number of cycles of use.

The object of this publication is to provide practical guidance on assessing the useful service life of plastics. It describes test procedures and extrapolation techniques together with the inherent limitations and problems. The Guide aims to make available the wealth of information that can be applied to help maximise the effectiveness of a durability-testing programme.

This guide seeks to be comprehensive but concentrates on the most common environmental effects causing degradation. The test procedures used are outlined and the relevant textbooks and international standards are well referenced. Examples of lifetime testing studies are cited.

The Practical Guide will be useful for anyone responsible for designing, manufacturing or testing plastic components. It will also be of benefit to suppliers and users of end products, as assessment of useful lifetime is critical to the economics and safety aspects of any component.

Key features

• Test methods outlined
• Accelerated testing discussed
• Prediction methods described
• Standards cited
• Key sources of information listed

Professor Roy Crawford obtained a first-class honours degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Queen's University of Belfast in 1970. He went on to obtain a PhD degree relating to the processing and properties of plastics in 1973. He obtained a DSc degree for research work on plastics in 1987. Over the past 30 years he has concentrated on studying the processing behaviour of plastics. Mark Kearns is the Rotational Moulding Research Manager of the Polymer Processing Research Centre at Queen's University, Belfast. He is a Chartered Chemical Engineer with an M.Phil Degree in Rotational Moulding. He manages rotational moulding research and development projects for companies and institutions across Europe, Australasia and North America, and organises the Association of Rotational Molders - sponsored, 'Advanced Rotational Moulding Training Seminars' both in Belfast and North America. Mark has spent over ten years in rotational moulding research, initially in Industry as a Development Engineer and Deputy Production Manager.