Evaluation by means of stress relaxation (after a step strain) experiments of the viscoelastic behavior of polymer melts in uniaxial extension

 As is widely acknowledged, morphology in most materials is far more sensitive to extensional than to shear deformations but, unfortunately, due to the experimental difficulties involved, there are no non-destructive, morphology probing techniques in such flows, i.e., the equivalent of stress relaxation and oscillatory experiments in shear flows. This paper tries to overcome some of those drawbacks by proposing an experimental technique that allows stress relaxation experiments after a step strain in uniaxial extension to be performed. The benefits of this technique are twofold: (a) while the deformation is small enough for the response to be in the linear viscoelastic regime it constitutes a probe of the microstructure of the material and (b) it allows the departure to the non-linear regime to be studied, useful, for example, for the definition of the damping function in uniaxial extensional flow or for the study of the response of materials to fast transient flows with a strong extensional component, such as contraction flows. In this work the proposed technique, which requires a correction to the apparent (theoretical) strain rate in order to allow the calculation of the true Hencky strains attained during the strain step, is tested and validated for two polyisobutylene melts. Received: 9 April 2001 Accepted: 26 July 2001