Xenon lamp aging test chamber - A tool for evaluating the weathering performance of polymer materials

Polymer materials are usually divided into five categories: plastics, rubber, fibers, coatings and adhesives, or what we call the five synthetic materials. When they are used outdoors, they are exposed to the outdoor environment for a long time and are exposed to sunlight (especially ultraviolet rays in the wavelength range of 290nm-400nm), oxygen, rain, dew and other factors.

Therefore, in order to make these materials in the outdoor use for a longer period of time, it is necessary to weather modification of these materials. In order to determine how well these polymers perform under outdoor conditions, it is necessary to evaluate them. Today, we would like to introduce you to Xenon lamp aging test chamber, a powerful tool for evaluating the weathering performance of polymer materials.

How do Xenon lamp aging test chamber work?

Xenon lamp aging test chamber is a type of aging test equipment that uses a xenon lamp as the light source to accelerate weathering tests on materials by simulating natural sunlight, rain, dew, and other climatic factors to obtain results on material weathering. By reproducing these conditions, it is combined into a cycle and allowed to perform automatically to complete the number of cycles. It simulates product materials that have been left outdoors for a long period of time to see if there is fading, discoloration, loss of gloss, chalking, cracking, brittleness, loss of strength, etc. It can also reproduce the destructiveness caused by rain and dew at the same time. It also reproduces the damage caused by rain and dew at the same time. It takes days or weeks to reproduce the damage that has occurred outdoors for months or even years.

Why is the Xenon lamp aging test chamber used to evaluate the weathering performance of materials?

First of all, xenon lamp aging test is a kind of artificial accelerated aging test simulating natural aging test, which is a process to simulate materials or products in the real use conditions involving sunlight, rain, dew and other climatic factors on the aging of the product to conduct the corresponding conditions to strengthen the experiment. Of course, the intensity of the experiment is much greater than the actual outdoor intensity to shorten the test time, you can understand the aging of the product after a short period of testing how many years of use. Xenon lamp aging test is not only an important means of screening formulations and optimizing product composition in the process of scientific research and production, but also an important element of product quality inspection in the industry.

The xenon lamp aging test is conducted in the laboratory. Because to simulate sunlight irradiation, which involves the choice of laboratory light source. Currently, the main laboratory light sources are carbon arc lamps, metal halide lamps, fluorescent UV lamps, xenon lamps, etc. The following chart compares the spectra of sunlight and these several laboratory light sources, it can be seen that the xenon lamp can more closely simulate sunlight, is currently the best simulation of an artificial light source, which is the reason why the xenon lamp aging test has become the most common test evaluation method for polymer material weathering evaluation.

For more information on the use of Xenon lamp aging test chamber, please pay attention to QINSUN instrument!