open access

https://hdl.handle.net/2115/53822

Fracture energy of polymer gels with controlled network structures

英語

2013-10-11

American Institute of Physics

The Journal of Chemical Physics

139(14)

144905

We have investigated the fracture behaviors of tetra-arm polyethylene glycol (Tetra-PEG) gels with controlled network structures. Tetra-PEG gels were prepared by AB-type crosslink-coupling of mutually reactive tetra-arm prepolymers with different concentrations and molecular weights. This series of controlled network structures, for the first time, enabled us to quantitatively examine the Lake-Thomas model, which is the most popular model predicting fracture energies of elastomers. The experimental data showed good agreement with the Lake-Thomas model, and indicated a new molecular interpretation for the displacement length (L), the area around a crack tip within which the network strands are fully stretched. L corresponded to the three times of end-to-end distance of network strands, regardless of all parameters examined. We conclude that the Lake-Thomas model can quantitatively predict the fracture energy of polymer network without trapped entanglements, with the enhancement factor being near 3.

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Copyright 2013 American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in J. Chem. Phys. 139, 144905, 2013 and may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4823834.

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