Key course information
- Course learning format: RECORDED ONLINE COURSE
- More course dates: See below or click 'Register'
- Pricing and early bird rates: click 'Register' to preview
- Course duration: 4 hours of recorded modules available
- Course access: 28 days to access course materials, learn when it suits you
- Learning support: Optional live Q&A after course completion
- Electronic course notes
- Gain CPD Credits: Smithers training is IOM3 Quality Assured and counts towards professional development.
To book, click Register and choose a session
Looking for an alternative format?
Upcoming online course dates
| Select a session when registering | |
|---|---|
| 8 Dec - 5 Jan 26 | 20 Jul - 17 Aug 26 |
| 16 Feb - 16 Mar 26 | 19 Oct - 16 Nov 26 |
| 11 May - 8 Jun 26 | |
Course overview
Light-weighting, metal replacement and harsher service environments are placing greater demands on plastic and rubber materials.
Factors such as high stress, temperature extremes and chemical exposure can all affect long-term performance.
This course explains how polymers age and degrade over time and shows how to account for these effects in material selection, product design and testing.
Learning outcomes
- Understand the long-term behaviour and degradation of plastics and rubber.
- Recognise how service conditions such as stress, temperature and environment affect material performance.
- Know how to test and evaluate materials to determine long-term properties.
- Learn how acceleration techniques can be used to predict service life.
- Gain greater confidence in generating and applying design data for durable product performance.
Course content
Introduction to Polymer Types and their Behaviour- How polymer structure affects the properties of the material
- Differences between rubbers and plastics.
- Overview of various mechanisms responsible for loss of performance including:
- Viscoelasticity
- Chemical and thermal ageing
- Combination effects such as environmental stress cracking (ESC).
- Review of methods used to test and evaluate the long-term performance of plastics and rubbers.
- Typical ageing techniques and testing methods including:
- Creep
- Relaxation
- Fatigue along
- Chemical degradation techniques.
- Real-time testing of polymers is often impractical due to long service lifetimes.
- This section introduces the key methodologies used to accelerate ageing and predict performance over time, including Arrhenius analysis and time–temperature superposition.
- You’ll also learn how to interpret accelerated test data for use in design validation and product qualification.
- Example case studies of designing with long term properties in mind and the generating of relevant accelerated test data.
Who should attend
Designed for engineers, designers and technical professionals responsible for ensuring plastic and rubber components perform reliably in demanding service environments.
This course will help you understand how to generate and apply long-term performance data to improve product reliability, increase design confidence and reduce the risk of in-service failure
Meet your expert tutor
Dr Andrew Hulme – Principal Consultant, Plastics
An expert plastic consultant for over 25 years – Andrew specialises in durability and lifetime predictions for plastic components in their operating environments (including material selection, failure prevention, and design for manufacture) – providing clients with improved confidence in design and material selection.
What our delegates say about the course material
“I enjoyed it and learnt a lot about durability and failures of plastics
.”
Sam Dainton (Raymarine)
“Lots of technical detail, but informative.”
Darren Boden (Raymarine)
Contact us or download a brochure
Reach out to the training team now - ask about this course or discuss your training goals.
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