Yielding behavior of glassy polymers. I. Free-volume model

Rigid, glassy polymers show a diversity of tensile behavior-ranging from apparently brittle to ductile. To delineate some of the factors that control the toughness or impact resistance of these polymers, the yielding behavior of poly (methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) was studied. Results of other workers have shown that the cold flow exhibited by many glassy polymers can be explained qualitatively by a free-volume model. The treatment assumes that molecular flow is permitted when the free volume increase, resulting from the dilatational component of the applied stress, is sufficient to bring the total free volume to that characteristic of the polymer liquid. The present study refines this approach by introducing an “effective temperature,” defined as that hypothetical temperature at which the glass would have an equilibrium free volume equal to the total free volume of the nonequilibrium glass at temperature T. Equations are derived which more satisfactorily describe the temperature and strain-rate dependences of the tensile yield strain of PMMA glass from -10° to 90°C at rates between 0.015 and 120%/sec.