Energetic approach for the fatigue assessment of PE100

In the recent years, polyethylene, especially with its highest standard PE100, has been adopted in several industrial fields due to its good mechanical resistance and lightness, combined with low cost. On the other hand, the different manufacturing and working conditions severally affects its mechanical performances, hence extremely time-consuming fatigue tests have to be carried out in order to assess them. The Static Thermographic Method (STM) has been applied to a large set of engineering materials in order to evaluate the limit stress at which the material's surface temperature trend deviates from the linearity during a static traction test. In the present work, the STM is applied on PE100 in order to investigate its fatigue properties. The limit stress is compared with the fatigue limit obtained by traditional fatigue tests showing good agreement. The STM is a rapid tests procedure able to derive the fatigue properties of the material in a very short amount of time and with a limited number of specimens.