Viscoelasticity of main chain liquid crystalline elastomers

Linear viscoelastic models

“…The above puzzle conflicts with many previous studies on rheology and time-temperature superposition (TTS), whereas similar types of results have been obtained by van Gurp and Palmen [5] and many other authors [6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. However, since our results obtained using precise models were more reliable than those developed previously, we were able to investigate this anomaly and verify TTS only for thermorheologically simple materials.…”

Viscoelasticity of the polydomain-monodomain transition in main-chain liquid crystal elastomers

“…The TTS principle stems from the idea that thermorheologically simple materials present identical viscoelastic behaviors at equivalent pairs of time and temperature values. Master curves using the TTS principle have been built for the storage and loss moduli of LCEs in the nematic domain [1,25,26]. Similarly, we built the storage modulus master curves by shifting along the frequency axis each frequency sweep curve at a specific temperature in order to superimpose it with the neighboring temperatures curves (equ.…”

Polydomain–Monodomain Orientational Process in Smectic‐C Main‐Chain Liquid‐Crystalline Elastomers

“…[3] The first attempts to study PM transitions in main-chain systems were done on the frame of Smectic-A (SmA) main-chain liquid-crystalline thermosets, [4,5] where four distinct regions were found from stress-strain deformations and stress relaxation experiments: [6] a linear viscoelastic deformation, a homogeneous yielding, a strain softening and a strain hardening region. The first experiment on main-chain networks was done on SmA and nematic MCLCEs, [7] and dynamic mechanical analysis already showed differences with respect to side-chain systems.…”