Nonlinear viscoelastic and viscoplastic response of glassy polymers

Abstract The main features of inelastic mechanical behavior of glassy state were studied theoretically and experimentally in terms of tensile stress‐strain and tensile creep experiments. A theoretical treatment introduced in earlier work, which takes into account the viscoelastic path at small strains and the viscoplastic one at higher stresses, proved to be capable of describing the main aspects of mechanical response of glassy polymers, i.e. nonlinear viscoelasticity during creep procedure, and yield stress, yield strain, strain softening and rate effect in a constant crosshead speed test.