Impact Evaluation of Propylene Polymers

LAURA FASCE; VALERIA PETTARIN; CELINA BERNAL; PATRICIA FRONTINI

Prague, Czech Republic

Conferencia; Mechanical Behaviour of Polymeric Materials; 1998

In this work the impact behavior of PP homopolymer, PP copolymer and ethylene-buthene-propylene terpolymer was evaluated through conventional and non-conventional mechanical testing. The conventional notched Izod and Charpy tests were used to determine materials toughness while unnothched Charpy test was carried out in order to study the notch sensitivy of the materials. Tensile impact loading was also applied. Toughness obtained from conventional tests were contrasted to the widely used GIC parameter derived from Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics and the novel Essential Work of Fracture concept recently applied for impact evaluation of polymers. Charpy, Izod, tensile and GIC methods were possible to applied to all materials studied here and results displayed high dispersion. On the other hand the Essential Work of Fracture method was only applicable for PP terpolymer due to the absence of a highly deformed ligament previous to the crack advance in the other materilas.