Crystallization under deformation or flow

While crystallization of polymers in the absence of deformation is conceptually simpler, most polymers in industrial practice are solidified under the influence of deformational flow fields. The consequences of such fields are far from trivial, giving rise to strikingly different crystal sizes, orientations, and semicrystalline morphology these effects are dealt with in greater detail in Chapter 14 and Chapter 15. The shish-kebab morphology observed during crystallization of PE in uniaxial flow is one such well-known distinction. Another is the amplification of nucleation density, by as much as five orders of magnitude for a modest input of work of 

A novel approach to flow- or deformation-induced crystallization entails the use of MC methods that have been developed to generate nonequUibrium ensembles of polymer melts that are characterized by some degree of anisotropy [133,135,136]. Recently,Baig and Edwards employed one of these methods to study crystallization of a UA model of C78 over a range of temperatures from 300 to 450 K, using a uniaxial flow field tensor whose values were estimated to mimic the behavior 

---