Filler effect on the recoil kinetics of drawn polystyrene

Recovery experiments above Tg have been performed on glass bead and short glass fiber polystyrene composite sheets obtained from extrusion and subsequent hot drawing. A shift procedure has been applied to recoil data using the Williams‐Landel‐Ferry (WLF) equation with the same values of C1 and C2 used for unfilled polystyrene. The data reported show that an improvement of the dimensional stability of a drawn thermoplastic material can be obtained by adding very low volume percentage of fibers. Moreover, all the recoil data have been reduced to a unique generalized master curve which takes into account the draw ratio, the filler content, and geometry, using a fractional distance from equilibrium as a measure of the recovery. These results indicate that the presence of the filler does not affect the recoil kinetics of the polymeric matrix.