Crystallite elastic constants and macroscopic moduli of isotropic semicrystalline polyethylenes

Available literature data, augmented with a few mild and plausible assumptions, have been used to derive an estimated empirical compliance matrix for orthorhombic crystalline polyethylene at ambient conditions. Compared with this representation of experimental observations, reported theoretical compliance surfaces, derived from molecular mechanics, are shown to be in quantitative disagreement, although qualitatively their shapes are not dissimilar. It is further shown that if an accurate theoretical determination were to be available, it would yield an ability to translate (in surprisingly few, and rather simple, theoretical steps) directly from interatomic forces, acting over nanometer lengths, into realistic, crystallinity‐dependent, estimates of macroscopic moduli of isotropic semicrystalline polyethylenes.