Modelling of the degradation of mechanical properties of high-density polyethylene based-packaging exposed to amyl acetate solution.

In this paper, we studied the container-content interaction between a high-density polyethylene-based packaging (HDPE) and amyl acetate solution considered as diffusing agent. We were specifically interested in the impact of sorption and diffusion phenomena on the mechanical properties of HDPE bottles under static conditions at different stages of physical aging. Several uniaxial tests were realized on samples cut from bottles and structural tests were performed on bottles. The analysis of such various experimental results highlighted the Fickian nature of the diffusion phenomenon and the decrease of the compression strength of the bottles with the preconditioning time. We have also focused on the modelling of the mechanical behavior of HDPE taking into account the mass transfer induced by the diffusion phenomenon. Elastic-viscoplastic model was proposed and implemented in the finite element code ABAQUS. The parameters of this model were identified from tensile tests by solving an optimization problem. The identified models have been validated by numerical simulation of top-load compression of HDPE bottles. The obtained numerical results are in a good agreement with experimental measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]