The Energy Barriers Model for the Physical Description of the Viscoelasticity of Synthetic Polymers: Application to the Uniaxial Orientational Drawing of Polyamide Films

The master equation describing the viscoelastic behavior of oriented polymer materials has been obtained based on the idea of the existence of various stable macromolecular conformations separated with potential barriers. It is shown that the geometric size of the molecular system is changed in stepwise manner upon the transition over the potential barrier as a consequence of birth or absorption of the quantum of the absolute deformation. The applicability of the model has been illustrated for different regimes of deformation of synthetic fibers. The accord between experiment and theory is demonstrated by using the example of polyamide-6.