Epoxy polymer exposed to solar radiation on long-term is required to a long-term environmental test in order to ensure the reliability of operation performance. In this paper, the solar aging experiment is performed for 7, 14, 28, 56, and 84 cycles, using solar simulator designed according to MIL-STD-810. After the aging experiment, measuring RGB values and using the CIE1976 color space, each RGB decreasing rates and total color shift are calculated. In addition, using a universal testing machine, mechnical properties according to ASTM-D638 are measured. As a result, by increasing solar aging period, total color shift is increased, and the tensile strength and elongation are decreased, but the elastic modulus and the poisson's ratio are slightly changed.
There are a number of effects by solar radiation in many aerospace industrial fields, such as degradation of mechanical properties, sealing effect of sealants or decolorization. Because it takes long time to investigate these effects by using the light of natural state, new methods are developed for accelerating this phenomenon. In this paper, we developed an apparatus to simulate accelerated solar radiation phenomenon selecting irradiation intensity 1,120W/m 2 as the designed environment. Epoxy polymer as the composite material was chosen and processed by ASTM-D638, a reference for tensile test of polymer and plastic. Total color shift was selected as the test category to evaluate acceleration of the test. We obtained acceleration factors and numerical model from test data and concluded it can shorten test periods by accelerated irradiation intensity of 1,120W/m
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