Craze Growth Experimental Evidence

Having set out a detailed model of craze growth, we now compare its predictions with recent experiments in two principal areas 1) the effects of entanglement density and 2) the effects of temperature. 

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There is, however, a theory for the growth of crazes that is consistent with all the experimental evidence. Argon, Hannoosh and Salama [52] have proposed that the craze front advances by a meniscus instability mechanism in which craze tufts are produced by the repeated break-up of the concave air/polymer interface at the crack tip, as illustrated in Figure 12.15. A theoretical treatment of this model predicted that the steady-state craze velocity would relate to the five-sixths power of the maximum principal tensile stress, and support for this result was obtained from experimental results on polystyrene and PMMA [52]. 

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