ABSTRACT
Measuring the durability of glass fiber reinforcements via weight loss methods is confounded in many chemicals by re-deposition of leached minerals back onto the fiber surface. When this happens, weight loss is no longer an accurate measure of fiber property retention. This re-deposition does not restore the reinforcement’s mechanical properties for which the weight loss method was simply serving as a proxy. A stress-corrosion method of composite rods patterned after ASTM(1) D2992 & ASTM D3681 is the gold standard for determining corrosion performance of glass fiber reinforcements, but it takes a minimum of 14 months to complete if enough fixtures are available. A new method accomplishes a similar evaluation of the reinforcement in 32 days without the diffusion limiting resin system. This paper will show parallels between the new method and traditional stress-corrosion testing.
