Temperature Effects on Crack Tip Plasticity in Polymers

The crack tip fields in amorphous glassy polymers are distinctly different from that in metals, and are associated with the initiation and propagation of shear bands. To study the effect of temperature on the near-tip behaviour for a stationary mode I crack, computations at low loading rates are confronted with adiabatic computations at high loading rates. It is shown that self-heating can raise the temperature in SAN sufficiently high locally to reach the glass transition temperature.