PSI - Issue 52

Chenxu Jiang et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 52 (2024) 63–71 Author name / Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000 – 000

69

7

initial orientation is altered (0°, 45°, and 90°), as depicted in Fig. 9a and Fig. 9b. The inhomogeneous behavior of semi-crystalline polymers is primarily dominated by the anisotropic structure within a single spherule. However, when the initial orientation is the same (-42°), as shown in Fig. 9c and Fig. 9d, slight differences in deformation within the spherulite are also observed due to interactions from adjacent spherulites.

Fig. 8 (a) Voronoi structure of multi-spherulites with different initial orientation (b) The A- A’ path and B - B’ path

Fig. 9 The stress distribution along the A- A’ path and B - B’ path (a) -(b) A, B, and C (c)-(d) D and E

Fig. 10 shows the effects of crystallinity on the elastic modulus of multi-spherulites. It can be seen from Fig. 10 that the relationship between elastic modulus and crystallinity follows the exponential function. This overall predicted distribution matches well with the data reported in the references. However, when the crystallinity is higher than 80%, the predicted elastic modulus is lower than the published data, which is due most likely to the ignoring of grain boundary behavior in the current work.