posted on 2009-07-14, 00:00authored byJianqi Zhang, Shanshan Hu, Jens Rieger, Stephan V. Roth, Rainer Gehrke, Yongfeng Men
The deformation mechanism of styrene/n-butyl acrylate copolymer latex films with fiber symmetric crystalline structure subjected to uniaxial stretching was studied using synchrotron small-angle X-ray scattering technique. The fibers were drawn at angles of 0, 35, and 55° with respect to the fiber axis. In all cases, the microscopic deformation within the crystallites was found to deviate from affine deformation behavior with respect to the macroscopic deformation ratio. Moreover, the extent of this deviation is different in the three cases. This peculiar behavior can be attributed to the relative orientation of the (111) plane of the crystals, the plane of densest packing, with respect to the stretching direction in each case. When the stretching direction coincides with the crystallographic (111) plane, which is the case for stretching directions of 0 and 55° with respect to the fiber axis, the microscopic deformation deviates less from affine behavior than when the stretching direction is arbitrarily oriented with respect to the crystallographic (111) plan. The dependence of tilting angle and d-spacing of selected (111) or (220) planes from the microscopic crystalline draw ratio are fully in accordance with theoretical considerations.