In this article we are interested in the study of the mechanical behaviour of an amorphous polymer, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene “ABS”, and this by uniaxial tensile tests on rectangular specimens containing a combined defect: test pieces pierced with a simple notch and other breakthroughs with double notch. The proposed approach consists in developing a method to calculate the evolution of the damage over the life of the materials that can be used to predict quantitatively the risk of sudden rupture in a room. To do this, we will use the method of evaluation of damage by the method of the variation of time of the tensile test. The damage calculation by the method of the variation of time was compared to the unified theory for different load levels. The correlation between the two methods was found for a loading level of 1.68.

Keywords : Damage, Mechanical behaviour, Polymer, Reliability, sudden rupture.