The Waterborne Symposium

Abstract
Simulating Water Ingress into a Model Polymer Coating during Exposure to Relative Humidity and Temperature Variations using Multiphysics Finite Element Analysis
Co-authors: James Rawlins and Gopinath Subramanian

Evaluating polymer coating failure experimentally under a range of operating conditions is both time consuming and expensive.  To predict coating failure, it is important to quantify the amount of small molecule ingress into the polymer coatings while accounting for environmental effects, material heterogeneity, and complex geometries.  We accomplish this using multiphysics finite element models to simulate small molecule transport by solving the transport equation with experimentally obtained temperature dependent diffusion coefficients.  This diffusion coefficient was determined via infrared spectroscopy for water through a phenoxy resin coating.  The environmental effects, material heterogeneity, and complex geometries were partitioned into separate modules that can be used to control the simulation complexity.  As an example, we used these models to simulate the barrier performance of a coating on an aerospace fastener.