화학공학소재연구정보센터
Journal of Polymer Science Part B: Polymer Physics, Vol.40, No.9, 802-812, 2002
Development of a methodology to predict material properties from environmental exposure. II. Structural features
A general scheme is presented in the first part of this series in which degradation-induced changes in a polymer that are produced by exposure to an aggressive environment are linked to measurable kinetic parameters and molecular weight distribution variations. Although general in nature for all polymers and environments, the data were collected on bisphenol A polycarbonate that was degraded by elevated temperatures. A parameter, tau, the product of a kinetic rate constant, k, and the environmental exposure time, provided a metric that was suitable for superposition methods to reduce the data. tau was directly related to the molecular weight distribution shifting during environmentally induced changes. This article extends the methodology to structure-property correlations such as the relationship of the glass-transition temperature, rheology, and the tensile strength of polycarbonate after the environmental treatment. Again, in a universal fashion, the tau value (the degree of degradation) was sufficient to model the observed physical property changes with the amount of exposure to the hostile environment. As long as the kinetics of the process of change are amenable to a mathematical model and a quantitative measure of the change in a fundamental polymer parameter is available, this methodology should be applicable to any polymer in any environment,