Relevance of cage recombination in the plastic deformation of polymers

For a polymer in which permanent rupture of individual molecules is the rate-limiting process for plastic deformation, the kinetics of chain-end diffusion and secondary radical reactions should be compared with the kinetics of caged radical recombination in the calculation of activation parameters for plastic deformation. If mechanisms of cage escape are slower than those for cage recombination, the activation parameters for plastic deformation will differ from those for the initial bond-breaking process. For the case of polyethylene deformed in the vicinity of 250°K, the critical thermally activated event appears to involve scission of the polymer molecule near the site of an abstracted hydrogen atom. For this system the dominant cage-escape mechanism is diffusion, which is faster than either hydrogen abstraction or unzipping to the monomer. However, at low stresses the rate of cage recombination is expected to be higher than the rate of cage escape, so that the activation parameters for deformation should be the sum of those for chain scission and diffusion. The contribution of diffusion (ca. 15 kcal/mole) to the activation energy for deformation (E^*, extrapolated to zero stress conditions) is relatively modest. However, the calculated molar activation volume for deformation V^* increases by almost an order of magnitude, i.e., from ca. 10 to ca. 76 cm³/mole when diffusion is required. Consideration of experimental values of E^* and V^* for high molecular weight polyethylene indicates that, in the regime examined, chain scission plus chain-end diffusion is required to effect plastic deformation.