Linear viscoelastic range dynamic functions

The viscoelastic response of polymer melts, that is, Eq. 3.1-19 or 3.1-20, become nonlinear beyond a level of strain y0, specific to their macromolecular structure and the temperature used. Beyond this strain limit of linear viscoelastic response, if, if, and rj become functions of the applied strain. In other words, although the applied deformations are cyclic, large amplitudes take the macromolecular, coiled, and entangled structure far away from equilibrium. In the linear viscoelastic range, on the other hand, the frequency (and temperature) dependence of if, rf, and rj is indicative of the specific macromolecular structure, responding to only small perturbations away from equilibrium. Thus, these dynamic rheological properties, as well as the commonly used dynamic moduli... 

These linear viscoelastic dynamic moduli are functions of frequency. For a suspension or an emulsitm material at low frequency, elastic stresses relax and viscous stresses dominate with the result that the loss modulus, G", is higher than the storage modulus, G. For a dilute solution, G" is larger than G over the entire frequency range, but they approach each other at higher frequencies as shown in Fig. 3. 

A decisive step towards the description of the micellar dynamics was taken with the first quantitative measurements of the linear viscoelastic response of these solutions. The pioneering works were those of Rehage, Hoffmann, Shikata, and Candau and their coworkers [14,19-33], The most fascinating result was that the viscoelasticity of entangled wormlike micelles was characterized by a single exponential in the response function. The stress relaxation function G t) was found of the form G t) = Goexp(-f/Ti ) over a broad temporal range, where Go denotes the elastic modulus and Xr is the relaxation time. Since then, this property was found repeatedly... 

Providing tests are performed at low strain amplitude, small enough for the complex modulus to exhibit no strain dependency, then dynamic testing yields in principle linear viscoelastic functions. This implies that, with an unknown material, a preliminary strain sweep test is performed in order to experimentally detect the maximum strain amplitude for a linear response to be observed [i.e. G lo, f(Y)]-As illustrated in Fig. 6 with data from Dick and Pawlowsky [20], such a requirement is practically never met within the available experimental window with filled rubber materials, whose linear region tends to move back to a lower and lower strain range as the filler content increases. 

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