Revisiting Safe Temperature for Environmental Accelerated Aging of Additively Manufactured Polymers

Abstract

Accelerated aging is widely used to study the long-term behavior of materials within laboratory time scales, particularly for materials exposed to solvent environments over extended periods. This is especially important for additively manufactured (AM) polymers, whose increasing use in naval and commercial undersea applications requires reliable methodologies for assessing durability under in-service conditions. A common approach relies on elevating the temperature below the glass transition or melting temperature to accelerate degradation. However, the temperature limits for accelerated aging of AM polymers remain poorly understood, particularly because temperatures beyond a threshold may activate deformation and degradation mechanisms that are absent under service conditions. To address this gap, this paper investigates fused deposition modeling (FDM) Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) exposed to saltwater and deionized (DI) water to establish a temperature threshold for accelerated aging in aqueous environments and propose a methodology for determining such thresholds. Controlled geometries and varying print directions were employed to explicitly probe the underlying mechanisms. We show that samples exposed to temperatures above the threshold exhibit pronounced shrinkage and warping along the printing direction due to the relaxation of process-induced internal stresses. These observations establish an accelerated-aging temperature threshold of 50$^\circ$C for ABS, beyond which additional mechanisms absent under service conditions become active. Additionally, the resulting geometric distortions are masked in thick geometries but become highly pronounced in thin structures. Moreover, solvent ionic content strongly influences water uptake, with saltwater reaching saturation in 1 day, whereas DI water did not reach saturation even after 30 days and exhibited greater mass uptake.