Plastic deformation semicrystalline polymers

The octahedral shear stress criterion has some appeal for materials that deform by dislocation motion In which the slip planes are randomly oriented. Dislocation motion Is dependent on the resolved shear stress In the plane of the dislocation and In Its direction of motion ( ). The stress required to initiate this motion is called the critical resolved shear stress. The octahedral shear stress might be viewed as the "root mean square" shear stress and hence an "average" of the shear stresses on these randomly oriented planes. It seems reasonable, therefore, to assume that slip would initiate when this stress reaches a critical value at least for polycrystal1ine metals. The role of dislocations on plastic deformation in polymers (even semicrystalline ones) has not been established. Nevertheless, slip is known to occur during polymer yielding and suggests the use of either the maximum shear stress or the octahedral shear stress criterion. The predictions of these two criteria are very close and never differ by more than 15%. The maximum shear stress criterion is always the more conservative of the two. 

Typically, a semicrystalline polymer has an amorphous component which is in the elastomeric (rubbery) temperature range - see Section 8.5.1 - and thus behaves elastically, and a crystalline component which deforms plastically when stressed. Typically, again, the crystalline component strain-hardens intensely this is how some polymer fibres (Section 8.4.5) acquire their extreme strength on drawing. 

When the polymeric material is compressed the local deformation beneath the indenter will consist of a complex combination of effects. The specific mechanism prevailing will depend on the strain field depth round the indenter and on the morphology of the polymer. According to the various mechanisms of the plastic deformation for semicrystalline polymers 40 the following effects may be anticipated ... 

Duckett, R. A. The Natural Draw Ratio, to appear in Proc. Internat. Spring School on Plastic Deformation of Amorphous and Semicrystalline Materials, Les Houches, France, April 19-29, 1982 (ed. B. Escaig, C. G Sell), (Les Editions de Physique, Les Ulis, 1983) p. 253 Gent, A. N., Thomas, A. G. J. Polymer Sci. A2 10, 571 (1972)... 

Figure 12 represents all steps of craze formation in crystalline polymers in a single model. It is based on Hornbogen s model for a crack tip in a polymer crystal, under the utilization of individual block drawings by Schultz for the fine scale nature of plastic deformation in semicrystalline thermoplastics. The classification into four regions A to D (after ) helps to describe and imderstand the influence of molecular parameters on craze strength and craze breakdown. 

It is well known that the mechanical behavior of glassy amorphous polymers is strongly influenced by hydrostatic pressure. A pronounced change is that polymers, which fracture in a brittle manner, can be made to yield by the application of hydrostatic pressure Additional experimental evidence for the role of a dilatational stress component in crazing in semicrystalline thermoplastics is obtainai by the tests in which hydrostatic pressure suppresses craze nucleation as a result, above a certain critical hydrostatic pressure the material can be plastically deformed. 

When a solid undergoes shear yielding, the local packing of its constituent units—atoms, molecules, or ions—changes to a new configuration that is stable in the absence of stresses. In glassy and semicrystalline polymers the plastic deformation takes place by means of local shear strains, without any appreciable changes in volume or density. 

As pointed out above, the semicrystalline polymer can be considered as a two-phase composite of amorphous regions sandwiched between hard crystalline lamellae (Fig. 4.2(a)). Crystal lamellae ( c) are normally 10-25 nm thick and have transverse dimensions of 0.1-1 pm while the amorphous layer thickness, a, is 5-10 nm. As mentioned in the previous section, melt-crystallized polymers generally exhibit a spherulitic morphology in which ribbon-like lamellae are arranged radially in the polycrystalline aggregate (Bassett, 1981). Since the indentation process involves plastic yielding under the stress field of the indenter, microhardness is correlated to the modes of deformation of the semicrystalline polymers (see Chapter 2). These... 

This equation assumes that the semicrystalline polymer is a two-phase system and that the microhardness (yield) is due to plastic deformation taking place only in the crystalline regions. However, for polymers like PET or PEEK, when Tg > T the microhardness of the amorphous phase Ha 0 (Deslandes etal, 1991). 

While due to their well-known plastic deformation properties glassy polymers provide excellent model systems for fracture studies, most engineering plastics are semicrystalline. Nevertheless, the molecular mechanisms of reinforcement of interfaces between semicrystalline polymers are much less well understood and the first systematic studies on the subject have only appeared recently [16, 30,96-99]. The reasons for this are mainly twofold ... 

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