Simulating Water Ingress into a Model Polymer Coating during Exposure to Relative ' Humidity and Temperature Variations using Multiphysics Finite Element Analysis

摘要

Failure of polymer coatings is a ubiquitous and constant issue in the protection of important infrastructure and assets. Accelerated testing methods that expose coating systems to elevated and/or cycling temperatures and relative humidities are commonly used to assess the probability of coating failure, but these exposure methods can lead to failure modes that would not occur in coatings during use. Alternatively, a computational approach using multiphysics finite element models to simulate the physics of the failure mechanisms could improve the accuracy of failure prediction over longtime scales and shorten the amount of time required to determine time to failure of polymer coatings. In this paper, we describe the development of a finite element model to simulate water uptake into polymer coatings while exposed to constant, cyclic, and real weather conditions.