Question

What are the different type of defects that affect the mechanical properties in polymers?

Answer 1

In crystalline inorganic solids, the defects are well developed but the proper study is still undeveloped in ordered polymers.

Some of the many reasons for this are

    synthetic polymers have been developed recently but metal and ceramic materials have been the center of interest even from ancient times.
    to understand the organizations in organic polymers, a very high resolution is required, which makes analysis rigorous and uninteresting for people to work.
    additional complexities due to their connectivity and microstructures like an assembly of proteins or carbohydrates.
    There are problems associated with isolation.

As a result, it was found out that the polymers are either free of defects of having defects in abundance.

Small changes like point defects in the mutation of sites by other amino acids in proteins were said to have no effect on the overall stress or strain of protein polymer. So, there is no severe effect of microstructural structure changes on macromolecular properties of polymers.

But recently, there is some research done on studying defects in polymers due to their applications in optoelectronic devices like thin film transistors and electroluminescent displays. Some

Scientists have studied the topology, elastic properties, and mobilities of defects in liquid crystalline polymers using molecular dynamics simulations. The study point outs that there are complications with the experimental characterization of polymers due to their high viscocity and high defects density and thermal degradations. it is also proposed that the rheology and the orientation of the layers have relative effect on mechanial strengths of certain types of carbon nanotubes and graphene structures.