Impact of aging conditions on mechanical properties of thermoplastic polyurethane

In this study, impact of environmental aging conditions on the mechanical properties of thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) was investigated. Especially, effect of temperature on water diffusion has been studied. Water-sorption experiments, tensile test and dynamic mechanical thermal analysis (DMTA) were performed after immersion in distilled water at different temperatures (25, 70 and 90 °C). The sorption process was analyzed by gravimetric measurements at different temperatures. Also, diffusion coefficients of solvent molecules in the TPU samples were identified. Therefore the activation energy and the mixing enthalpy were deduced. The aging impact on some mechanical properties of this material has been investigated after various aging cycles. Degradation of mechanical properties was observed. In fact, elastic modulus and stress at 200% of strain were decreased. It was also shown that such degradation largely depends on both aging temperature and aging immersion duration. The storage modulus (E′) was also affected by the hygrothermal (HT) environment. The modification of mechanical properties seems to be well correlated to structural observations obtained from scanning electron microscopy (SEM) photographs. Finally, through thermal aging experiments, it was deduced that the combination of temperature with water seems to be a major factor of TPU degradation.