Chung, Li, Oliphant, Vibien, Rozental-Evesque, Rabaud
# 2008 Budapest
Plastic piping materials confer many advantages for applications in Potable Water transportation. Considerable research has been conducted to develop methodologies for ensuring performance in these applications for service lifetimes that target an excess of 100 years. A key component of these accelerated methodologies is ensuring that the mechanisms observed in accelerated testing are the same as those potentially occurring in the field. In this paper, field exposed plastic piping materials are examined to determine the mechanisms of aging observed in actual end-use environments and compare those to accelerated validation methodologies employed in the laboratory. Based on these observations, strategies for performance validation are discussed.