PREDICTION OF LONG-TERM AGING OF CELLULAR PLASTICS

Chlorofluorocarbon(CFC)-based cellular plastics are facing the challen ge of environmental protection. The cellular plastic industry has been looking for new blowing agents as alternatives for CFCs since the Mon treal Protocol was signed in 1987. The prediction of long-term thermal performance of newly developed cellular plastics thus becomes apparen t. In this paper, the model ACP (aging of cellular plastic) is introdu ced. This model was originally developed for evaluating the thermal pe rformance of CFC-based cellular plastics. By updating, it can handle t he heat and mass transfer of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, CFC-11, CFC-12, CFC-22, n-Pentane, iso-Pentane, neo-Pentane and cyclo-Pentane . In comparison with short-term measurements, the ACP program now is a ble to predict the aging performance of pentane-based cellular plastic s. The effective strategy for evaluating the long-term thermal perform ance of cellular plastics is to combine the short-term measurements an d model simulation.