Characterization of Stress Relaxation of cured EPDM using Chemiluminescence

摘要

Stress relaxation is a limiting factor for elastomers used for seals. However, the mechanism of stress relaxation is not fully understood because of the complexity of influencing parameters like temperature, chemicals, stress etc. From this reason a new method is developed to characterize the thermal oxidation process under deformation using chemiluminescence (CL). An increase in stress on the material accel-erates the aging speed of a peroxide crosslinked EPDM-material. Quantitative measurements using FT-IR spectroscopy and CL in comparison show a high correlation for the oxidation of the polymer. The thermal oxidative aging processes can be traced by coupling chemiluminescence and physical relaxation test.