Accelerated aging experiments were carried out on a natural rubber vulcanizate exposed to air and to seawater. Failure strain, shown to correlate well with the fatigue lifetime, was used to monitor the extent of degradation. The effect of temperature on the rate of aging followed an Arrhenius law, with activation energies equal to 90 ± 4 and 63 ± 3 kJ/mol for air and seawater aging, respectively. The difference can be accounted for by the difference in oxygen concentration for the two environments.

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Rubber Division, American Chemical Society, Inc.
2001
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