Elongational Flow of Blends of Long and Short Polymers: Effective Stretch Relaxation Time

Auhl, Dietmar; Chambon, Pierre; McLeish, Tom C.B.; Read, Daniel J.

doi:10.1103/physrevlett.103.136001

Elongational Flow of Blends of Long and Short Polymers: Effective Stretch Relaxation Time

Auhl, Dietmar; Chambon, Pierre; McLeish, Tom C.B.; Read, Daniel J.

Authors

Dietmar Auhl

Pierre Chambon

Tom C.B. McLeish

Daniel J. Read

Abstract

We study the onset of chain stretch and emergent extension hardening in the nonlinear rheological response of molten binary blends of long and short polymers. We predict that, upon dilution with short chains, the effective stretch relaxation time of the long chains initially increases in proportion to ϕL-α (where ϕL is the volume fraction of long chains and α is the dilution exponent for entanglements). We confirm this behavior experimentally, in a set of experiments that measure both the dilution exponent from linear rheology and the effective stretch relaxation time under extensional flow.

Citation

Auhl, D., Chambon, P., McLeish, T. C., & Read, D. J. (2009). Elongational Flow of Blends of Long and Short Polymers: Effective Stretch Relaxation Time. Physical Review Letters, 103(13), Article 136001. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.103.136001

Journal Article Type	Article
Publication Date	Sep 1, 2009
Deposit Date	Oct 31, 2011
Publicly Available Date	Jan 12, 2012
Journal	Physical Review Letters
Print ISSN	0031-9007
Electronic ISSN	1079-7114
Publisher	American Physical Society
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	103
Issue	13
Article Number	136001
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.103.136001