Evolution of the Characteristic Relaxation Time for Volume of Polystyrene

摘要

We have developed a new experimental technique that uses sequential temperature perturbations during volume recovery in order to quantitatively follow the evolution of the characteristic relaxation time for volume during structural recovery. The experiments are analogous to the intermittent creep experiments popularized by Struik. Preliminary results show that, for the set of temperature down jumps and memory experiments investigated, the characteristic relaxation time cannot depend only on the instantaneous state of the material. In fact, the results cannot be described by any of the published equations in the literature relating the characteristic relaxation time to volume and temperature.