Predicting the aging and degradation of polymeric materials is important to almost every industry (e.g automobile, food packaging, defense applications, satellites, biomedical, etc). One key challenge with many prediction methods is the fact that materials are usually assembled and used as multi-material assemblies. Hence, we need a tool sophisticated enough to predict the aging of the assembly, and, specifically, long term compatibility issues of multiple materials in contact with each other and with the surrounding environment. We are developing a computational tool for simulating the aging and chemical compatibility of multiple material assemblies. Our model includes (1) a triple-mode sorption model that includes absorption, adsorption, and pooling of species, (2) molecular diffusion, and (3) chemical reaction kinetics. Using a 1D or 3D mesh we can simultaneously simulate the transport and chemical reactions of mobile species through polymeric materials. This talk will discuss our approach and our progress to date, which will include, model development and experimental work using polymeric systems to parameterize and validate the model. This work performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.

Predicting multi-material aging and degradation using reactive transport modeling

248th National Meeting (2014)

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