Conclusion

Over the past thirty years, the field of polymer stabilization has seen no major qualitative leap forward. The main stabilizing functions currently in use were already known in the 1970s. What has evolved is essentially our understanding of stabilization mechanisms and the physical and chemical processes that limit the effectiveness of stabilizers. Until recently, practitioners had to make do with comparative tests to make a relative assessment of the durability of stabilized polymers. In this dossier, we have attempted to show that non-empirical kinetic modeling, combining chemistry and transport phenomena, is now becoming possible, even if it is still in its infancy. Implementing these models will require considerable adaptation on the part of practitioners, but will in any case be made indispensable by the inevitable growth in economic and environmental constraints.