Characterization of strain bursts in high density polyethylene by means of a novel nano creep test

Abstract Recent nanoindentation experiments have shown that in semi-crystalline polymers, strain bursts emerge during creep experiments. A shortcome of nanoindentation is that due to the inhomogeneous stress field, a critical stress for the onset of strain bursts cannot be determined, and the resolution of the method seems to be limited. Since the strain bursts in polymers are in the nm range, an extremely high resolution in deformation measurement is necessary. Such a resolution is provided by modern solid state rheometers having a resolution −6  rad. With such a facility, in this work single strain bursts in PE-HD have been investigated in creep mode at stresses as low as