Polyethylene foils, used as greenhouse foils stabilized with various types of sterically hindered amine light stabilizers (HALS), showed an extraordinary prolonged lifetime on exposure to natural or artificial weathering if a gas-phase fluorination under low-pressure conditions was applied. The fluorination was performed using F2/N2 mixtures and provided ca. 50 F/100 C (fluorination degree ap25%). The lifetimes of fluorinated PE foils on exposure to artificial or natural weathering were increased at least by a factor of 2-4 as measured in terms of tensile strength and elongation at break.
While artificial weathering is a long-established tool to investigate long-term behaviour of polymers at outdoor conditions, the use of chemiluminescence as a highly sensitive and broadly applicable sensor for the effected change is a recent addition. This combination of artificial weathering with chemiluminescence could already be successfully applied to differentiate and evaluate long-term stability of various real use polymeric building materials relatively to each other and promises to be a useful tool for a variety of other polymeric materials as well.