Thermal shrinkage of oriented semicrystalline poly(ethylene terephthalate)

Abstract

Abstract The shrinkage of commercial oriented poly(ethylene terephthalate) filaments was studied within the framework of the kinetic theory of rubberlike elasticity. Previous workers had found that the shrinkage and optical behavior of amorphous polymers could be satisfactorily explained in terms of this theory. Such an analysis is now applied to semicrystalline samples of moderate and high draw ratios (from 2× to 6×). It was found in this work that the thermal shrinkage force behavior as well as the optical anisotropy as a function of stretch can be explained in terms of the theory of rubberlike elasticity, if the following reasonable assumption is made: the average number of statistical segments per network chain in the noncrosslinked sample increases as a function of the draw ratio. A possible mechanism for such behavior is the relaxation of some of the chain entaglements due to the strain imposed externally on the fiber.