What is it about?
A common epoxy polymer is exposed to water - and swells. Swelling causes a decrease in material's mechanical strength and fatigue performance by 20%. Interestingly, both strength and fatigue performance decrease by the same value. When this material is dried, it fully regains its initial performance.
Featured Image
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The link between strength and fatigue perfomance is explored. It appears that decrease in fatigue can be predicted from the decrease of static strength. This is at least true for the studied polymer. In addition, this paper shows that the decrease in mechanical performance can be fully regained when material is re-dried. This provides a direct link between mechanical performance and water absorbed by the polymer. An extremely important result for the studied polymer is the following: when material is saturated with water, the mechanical properties stop to decrease.
Perspectives
Future research should cover the following questions: if a polymer does not undergo chemical degradation (such as the polymer here), is a decrease in fatigue performance always predictable from the static strength, also for other materials? What is the fundamental link here?
Andrey E. Krauklis
Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Hygrothermal Aging of Amine Epoxy: Reversible Static and Fatigue Properties, Open Engineering, November 2018, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/eng-2018-0050.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
