Nowadays, in-service damages such as impacts during overhaul or external influences, such as exposure to severe environments with chemical agents, thermal loadings or ultraviolet light have to be taken into account for the design of the elements. Therefore, knock-down factors have to be determined. This knock—down factors take into account an extensive number of conditions such as loads –both static and cyclic-, temperatures, impact damages or the exposure to aggressive mediums such as engine oils. Due to the costs and complexity of performing full scale tests including factors such as temperature and exposure to a variety of aggressive atmospheres, during the qualification, lot’s of test are necessary in order to certify the integrity of the component material.

The actual state of the art is to determine this knock-down factors independently and not in combination of them, meaning that composite samples are for example immersed during a determined time in a fluid and afterwards tested statically at a given temperature.

The innovative idea to develop during this project was to develop a test set-up permitting to expose on the same time the specimen to not only thermal and cyclic mechanical loading, but also to synthetic engine oils atmospheres in order to be afterwards able to quantify how the global interaction of these parameters is and be able to predict failure of real manufactured parts subjected to “near reality” loading (in terms of loading, temperature and oil exposure) scenarios.