Micromechanics of the growth of a craze fibril in glassy polymers

The primary objective of this work is to model the growth and eventual failure of a craze fibril in a glassy polymer, starting from a primitive fibril. Experimental investigations have shown that properties like the entanglement density of a polymer play a pivotal role in determining whether macroscopic failure of a polymer occurs through crazing or shear yielding. Failure is seen to be related to the formation of a soft 'active zone' at the craze-bulk interface, through disentanglement. The present work aims at explaining some of the experimental findings about fibril growth and failure in glassy polymers on the basis of a continuum model of a craze with a constitutive model that accounts for yield, network hardening and disentanglement. The results show that this approach is capable of providing explanations for experimentally observed facts such as the propensity to crazing in polymers with low entanglement density and the linearity between the stretch in a fibril and the maximum stretch of a molecular strand in the fibril.