Stress-induced glass transitions

In 1995, Chudnovsky and coworkers (Zhou, Chudnovsky, Bosnyak, & Sehanobish, 1995) interpreted cold drawing in polymeric glasses as a dual glass transition, first from glass state to a liquid, and then, after drawing turned the glass into a non-isotropic oriented polymeric liquid, from oriented liquid to a new glass state. On the microscopic scale, a glass is a system with local arrangements of particles frozen. At the glass–liquid transition temperature, these arrangements become changeable at an observable time scale. Assuming that cold drawing is caused by slip-stick rearrangements in small clusters throughout the material, we investigate the relations of conventional glass transition to the onset of cold drawing; our theory is based on a generalization of Eyring’s ideas of stress-dependent rearrangement activation energies.