A rod-spring model for main-chain liquid crystalline polymers containing hairpins
نویسنده
چکیده
Main-chain liquid crystalline polymers (LCPs) are used to produce strong fibers due to their ability to form highly-ordered orientational states. For sufficiently long chains it is known that loss of entropy in such highly-ordered states is partly recovered by the formation of socalled hairpins or kinks. The presence of hairpins not only modifies the microstructure of LCPs, but it has also been conjectured that hairpins influence their macroscopic mechanical behavior. In this paper the influence of hairpins on the rheological properties of concentrated solutions of LCPs is studied.
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