Composite modeling for the effective elastic properties of semicrystalline polymers

Abstract

It is established that upper and lower bounds predict results far apart from each other for the effective elastic properties of semicrystalline polymers such as polyethylene.This is manly due to the high anisotropy of the elastic properties of the crystals.Composite modeling has been used to predict intermediate results between the bounds.Here, we show the details of composite modeling based on a two phase inclusion (crystalline lamella and amorphous domain) as the local representative element of a semicrystalline polymer.Three approaches, two composite bounds, and a composite self-consistent model, are used to compute the overall elastic properties.Details of the development of these approaches are given in this paper.We find good agreement between results from these approaches and experimental results for polyethylene.