Long time response of aging glassy polymers

Aging amorphous polymeric materials undergo free volume relaxation, which causes slowing down of the relaxation dynamics as a function of time. The resulting time dependency poses difficulties in predicting their long time physical behavior. In this work, we apply an effective time domain approach to the experimental data on aging amorphous polymers and demonstrate that it enables prediction of long time behavior over the extraordinary timescales. We demonstrate that, unlike the conventional methods, the proposed effective time domain approach can account for physical aging that occurs over the duration of the experiments. Furthermore, this procedure successfully describes time-temperature and time-stress superpositions. It can also allow incorporation of varying dependences of relaxation time on aging time as well as complicated but known deformation history in the same experiments. This work strongly suggests that the effective time domain approach can act as an important tool to analyze the long time physical behavior of aging amorphous polymeric materials. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.