Polymers are widely used for passive thermal insulation coatings on steel pipe in offshore oil and gas production. In this industry, structures used in deep sea have to be reliable, as they are in service for more than 20 years in a very severe environment: sea water, hydrostatic pressure and temperature gradient. One of the main questions is how to test and predict the lifetime of such structures in the laboratory? This study presents one approach that has been developed to characterize and predict the degradation of polymers used as thermal insulation materials. This paper is dedicated to polyurethane (polyether based) degradation in sea water at high temperature. Ageing has been performed in natural sea water under hydrostatic pressure at temperatures ranging from 70 to 120 °C on 2 mm thick samples. Water diffusion in the material and hydrolysis have been characterized using mass evolution and tensile tests. Based on these results, a model for the urethane hydrolysis reaction is proposed.
WOSInternational audienceWhile the geometry of aerospace assemblies is carefully controlled, for many industrial applications such as marine structures bond line thickness can vary significantly. In this study epoxy adhesive joints of different thicknesses between aluminium substrates have been characterized using physico-chemical analyses (differential scanning calorimetry, DSC; dynamic mechanical analysis, DMA; spectroscopy), nano-indentation and mechanical testing. Thermal analyses indicated no influence of thickness on structure. Nano-indentation revealed no evidence of an interphase at the metal/epoxy interface, nor any change in modulus for different thicknesses, though Raman spectroscopy suggested there may be slight variations in composition close to the substrates. However, mechanical testing using the modified Arcan fixture indicated a significant drop in strength and failure strain under pure tension and a smaller reduction for tension/shear and pure shear loads as thickness increased. Examination of sections through joints did not indicate any physical reason for this, but numerical analysis of the stress state revealed larger stress concentration factors for tensile loading in thick joints, which may explain the thickness effect. It is recommended that joint thickness should be kept below 0.8 mm to avoid obtaining artificially low values with the Arcan test
Syntactic foams, used in submersibles and in pipelines for deep sea oil wells, must be resistant to the severe conditions of the deep sea environment. As these foams will be in service for at least 20 years, their qualification testing is crucial. However, their mechanical characterization under real conditions of use is a challenge. In deep sea, the main loading is hydrostatic compression, however there is no standard procedure for testing material under pure hydrostatic pressure. The aim of this paper is to present a new characterization technique based on buoyancy loss measurement under hydrostatic pressure. To validate the method, two different syntactic foams (one brittle and one ductile) have been tested. Their behaviours under hydrostatic pressure have been followed by the proposed technique. The results from this innovative characterization technique have been compared to those of traditional uniaxial compression tests performed on the same materials.
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