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How Melt-Stretching Affects Mechanical Behavior Of Polymer Glasses, Shi-Qing Wang

Shi-Qing Wang

This work takes a simple phenomenological approach to the questions of when, how, and why a brittle polymer glass turns ductile and vice versa. Perceiving a polymer glass as a hybrid, we recognize that both the primary structure formed by van der Waals forces (network 1) and chain network (i.e., the vitrified entanglement network) (network 2) must be accounted for in any discussion of the mechanical responses. To show the benefit of this viewpoint, we first carried out well-defined melt-stretching experiments on four common polymer glasses (PS, PMMA, SAN, and PC) in a systematic way either at a fixed Hencky …