Thermal aging of a polyamide 66—experimental analysis and modeling

Abstract

The present paper presents an analysis of the thermal aging process of a polyamide 66 at two different temperatures: −6 °C and 60 °C, and throughout a time span of 9000 h. The paper proposes a unified expression to estimate the mechanical behavior of the polyamide in tensile tests at the different aging stages. The goal is to present an algebraic equation able to describe the stress–strain curves that would be obtained using the ASTM D638-14 standard for a wide range of aging times, without the actual necessity of performing all the tests. It is shown that with a minimum of three tests performed at different aging stages, it is possible to obtain a reasonable approximation of the stress–strain curve for this range of time.