Systematic evaluation of different stress factors onto the degradation behaviour of plastics

The presented methods for analysing polymers cover a broad range of different material properties and seem to be suitable for the investigation of degradation processes and their effects. The results of the different methods correlate very well and show the influence of different additives on the degradation of PP. Confocal Raman microscopy allows to follow the ongoing degradation processes in a non-destructive way with high lateral resolution which significantly improves the information about a sample since the other methods usually analyze only the uppermost surface of the material or bulk material. The comparison of the degradation of natural and artificial aged samples shows only little correlation and that more work is necessary to get a scientific base for correlating accelerated ageing tests with real outdoor exposure.