This document describes a test method to determine the activation energy (Ea) of photochemical degradation reactions in accelerated weathering tests according to the Arrhenius model in the most comprehensive manner.
The determination of activation energies of photo-chemical degradation processes allows including the temperature into the evaluation and correlation of different weathering experiments as quantitative factor. Knowing the activation energy will improve the reliability and predictive value of artificial weathering.
NOTE
The use of the Arrhenius concept in artificial weathering simplifies complex chemical degradation processes and is therefore in this context a limited model to estimate the temperature dependency in weathering. However, bye following some basic experimental preconditions, the relevance of the estimates can be increased.