RELATING CREEP AND CREEP-RUPTURE IN PMMA USING A REDUCED VARIABLE APPROACH

Creep and creep rupture of PMMA at high stresses have been characterized and found to be relatable by use of reduced variables. It is shown that when the creep compliances can be correlated by a superposition principle for which the vertical shift is the ratio of the applied stress to a reference stress and when strain at failure is a constant, a commonly used failure criterion (that the product of the strain rate at failure and the time to failure is constant) becomes valid. The reduced variables approach is found to apply to two greatly different thermal histories. Consistent with the concept of physical aging, the response of a quenched sample is simply shifted along the log time axis to shorter times relative to the response of the aged sample.