A model of environmental craze growth in polymers

Abstract

A model of environmental craze growth has been developed based on the customary meniscus (or Rayleigh‐Taylor) instability model of craze propagation but allowing for the possibility that environmental plasticization may cause the active layer of material adjacent to the craze to be of significant thickness with respect to the fibril spacing. Initially, as the active layer thickness increases, the fibril growth rate increases at constant fibril spacing, but eventually the fibril spacing comes to be controlled only by the active layer thickness and not by the surface tension and stress. This model of craze growth has been coupled to a model of stress‐enhanced case II diffusion that is itself based on the Thomas‐Windle model. Two main regimes of craze thickness growth are distinguished. In one the craze growth rate is controlled by the velocity of the diffusion front, the meniscus instability growth rate is assumed to be relatively slow, so that a significant plasticized active layer exists whose thickness assures that the meniscus instability front travels at the same speed as the diffusion front. In the other regime the propagation of the craze front is sufficiently fast that it also forms the diffusion front, so the growth rate is controlled by a combination of the two processes: diffusion and meniscus instability. Copyright © 1989 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.