12. Slow Crack Growth of Polyethylene—Accelerated and Alternative Test Methods

Regarding lifetime of plastic products made of polyethylene (PE), resistance against slow crack growth failure is crucial. Therefore, in recent years material suppliers took a lot of effort into the improvement of PE materials leading to highly stress cracking resistant grades (e.g. PE 100-RC). This advantage in application unfortunately causes problems in material testing: As testing times become longer, highly resistant grades cannot be characterised quantitatively with standard test methods, like the Full-Notch Creep Test, anymore. Therefore, improved respectively new testing methods for the characterisation of slow crack growth resistance of PE have been developed. Results are presented and discussed for accelerated Full-Notch Creep Test (aFNCT), Strain Hardening Test (SHT) and Crack Round Bar (CRB) Test.