Morphology of glassy polymers

A study has been made of the annealing process which takes place when glassy polymers are heated at temperatures near their glass transition temperatures. Low‐angle x‐ray diffraction measurements, extending previous work using wide‐angle techniques, infrared, laser‐Raman, and scanning electron microscopical studies reflect no difference between quenched and annealed polymer. Replica electron micrographs do however indicate some structural reorganization. Differential scanning calorimetry and stress‐strain studies in conjunction with density measurements show that changes in all these occur on annealing but that at the present time conclusive evidence of local chain parallization is still awaited.