Whether you are a polymer producer or a polymer converter, accelerated R&D can provide reassurance in both the short and long-term performance of the base polymer.  Traditionally, the laboratory procedures and standards used in establishing this reassurance can be both time consuming and costly, particularly in terms of time to market and in terms of techniques, equipment and cost of international accreditation.

After Impact’s long and successful history with BP in identifying the right polymers and confidentially bringing these products to market with a full laboratory dossier, Impact has developed an exciting new portfolio of techniques and procedures which can accelerate your time to market and will increase your confidence in the long term performance. Impact calls this portfolio of tests SMART™ which can be applied across the whole polymer supply chain.

The key drivers behind the SMART™ procedure are as follows:

  • Requires SMall amounts of material (<100g)
  • Are Accelerated tests that can greatly reduce failure times
  • Can be Related or correlated to the performance of the final product
  • Can be used on small quantities in Thick section for products such as pipe and containers

Using only small quantities of material, as little as 50g, it is possible to undertake all the key tests illustrated in the following figure. Even impact performance and slow crack growth on thick samples can be undertaken using a host material to bulk out the sample.

The SMART™ techniques coupled with standard tests help ensure the overall integrity of the product for the intended market. As an example, using the SMART™ technique, Impact can predict fast fracture performance in both small scale pipe tests (S4) and also costly large scale pipe tests required by the UK gas industry standard.

Combined with Impact’s small scale slow crack growth test (FNCT), SMART™ indicates whether a pipe will pass the 14-month hydrostatic pressure pipe tests. Therefore, pipe resin development time can be reduced by more than 25% with cost savings of $100k’s.

Contact us to find out how our accelerated testing regimes can reduce your R&D time to market.

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