Socioeconomic
Data and Applications Center
Environmental Effects of Ozone Depletion 1998 Assessment |
A.L. Andrady (USA), S.H. Hamid (Saudi Arabia), X. Hu
(China)
and A. Torikai(Japan)
Assessment of the damage to materials, associated with ozone depletion, requires a knowledge of the wavelength dependence as well as the dose-response characteristics of the polymer degradation processes of interest. While the recent literature includes some reliable spectral sensitivity data little dose-response information has been reported making it difficult to make such assessments reliably at the present time. This is particularly true for the naturally-occurring materials popularly used in construction applicastions.
To maintain polymers at the same useful
lifetime in spite of increased solar UV-B content the amount of photostabilizers
used in the formulations might be increased. This strategy assumes that
conventional stabilizers will continue to be effective with the spectrally
altered UV-B-enhanced solar radiation. While the present understanding
of the degradation chemistry suggests the strategy to have merit, its effectiveness,
in an altered solar radiation environment, has not been demonstrated for
common polymers. The availability of this data is crucial to reliably estimate
the cost of mitigating the increased damage to materials as a result of
a possible partial depletion of the ozone layer using this approach.
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