On the Role of the Chemical Potential in Predicting Long Life Performance of Polymers and Polymeric Composites

This paper presents new theoretical approaches for assessing the impact of environmental factors on the performance and design lifetime prediction of structures fabricated from polymers and polymeric composites. The method focuses on the role of the chemical potential in such problems and presents an analysis based on calculation of the chemical potential for systems which do not meet the usual criteria of the thermodynamic limit and which may exist in low dimensionality. The method has been shown to provide predictions which are in much better agreement with experiment than those which have been used heretofore and removes many of the “anomalous” diffusion dichotomies which continue to arise in the literature.