文摘
The present rheological study reveals for the first time that entangled polymer solutions made of linear polystyrene or poly(methyl methacrylate) can exhibit strain hardening due to non-Gaussian stretching during startup shear at sufficiently high rates and temperatures well above their overall glass transition temperatures: Tg,solute > Texp > Tg,solution. The solutions made of high-Tg polymers only show partial yielding in the sense that both shear and normal stresses grow monotonically in time until a point of rupture, signified by an emergent cusp in the stress vs strain curve and macroscopic breakup along a shear plane. The shear softening-to-hardening transition, which occurs as a function of the applied shear rate, happens at lower equivalent rate with decreasing temperature, violating the time–temperature superposition principle.