Nondestructive Testing of Polymer Aging Based on Room-Temperature Phosphorescence.

Abstract

Polymeric room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP) materials have attracted much attention due to their advantages of easy processing and excellent luminescent properties. However, it is still a challenge to obtain industrial production grade material through simple and green processing strategies. Herein, through the codoping strategy, different phosphors were embedded into nylon, a kind of polymer matrix, to obtain a series of highly efficient RTP materials without any organic solvents, for which the phosphorescence lifetime and brightness could reach 628.8 ms and 14 cd/m², respectively. Besides, we found that the photophysical properties of these RTP materials varied greatly among different types of nylon matrix, owing to the divergence in the number of hydrogen bonding "sites". The superiority of the injection molding processing strategy enables the preparation of RTP materials to achieve desolvation, which could also be processed into any complex and desiring shape. Significantly, nylon can affect molecular chain changes due to aging and other problems, so that these RTP materials are considered as potential nondestructive testing for nylon product aging levels. This strategy also paves the way for the development of large-scale, eco-friendly, and practical application RTP materials and provides new ideas to industrialized preparation of long-lived RTP materials in the future.