Degradation by radiation

Performance requirements, environmental issues, and avaUabUity/cost of the material will mainly drive material requirement in the future. In order to face the huge tire wastage problem causing major hazards to the environment, future development in mbbery materials will be focused on development of thermoplastic polymer so that used polymer could be recovered by thermal treatment and separation, biological degradation by radiation/addition of chemical into the mbber compound that could be activated by exposure to radiation and development of biopolymer. 

Polyisobutylene. The polymers which we have dealt with until now are of the type which mainly crosslink under the influence of radiation in vacuo. Polyisobutylene with one tetrasubstituted carbon in each repeat unit can be considered as the simplest hydrocarbon polymer of the other type—i.e., the polymers degraded by radiation. 

These materials, primarily aluminized polymers, may be very sensitive to mechanical and thermal degradation by radiation. Heating due to eddy currents induced by pulsed magnetic fields may be significant. 

A further condition is that the destruction caused by the interaction of the radiation with the object should be as slight as possible, so that the image is not substantially degraded by radiation damage. 

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