Monitoring the polyamide 11 degradation by thermal properties and X-ray fluorescence spectrometry allied to chemometric methods

The influence of temperature (110 and 120 °C) on the ageing of piping made from polyamide 11 (PA‐11) containing 10–12% of plasticizer was studied using deionized water (pH ≈ 7.0). A clean analytical methodology has been employed for quality control of polymeric materials: energy‐dispersive X‐ray fluorescence spectrometry (ED‐XRF). It provides a fast and suitable technique to characterize chemical elements because of its multielemental capability, good sensitivity, high precision, short analytical time, and nondestructive nature. Herein, the content of additive in PA‐11 was monitored from ED‐XRF measurements where the abundance of the S line is directly related to the ageing time, agreeing with the thermogravimetric analysis. The XRF data were allied to chemometric treatment to classify PA‐11 samples according to the amount of additive and weight average molar mass change, predicting the ageing time, and viscosity values of PA‐11. Therefore, the XRF can be used as a clean analytical methodology to monitor the PA‐11 degradation, thus eliminating the use of toxic organic solvents (necessary to viscosity measurements) and reducing the working time. Also, the effect of hydrolysis on the structure over time and the material morphology were monitored through measurements of dynamic mechanical analysis and differential scanning calorimetry. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.