1. faster relaxation of the branches
The Dynamics of Entangled Polymer Melts With Multiple Branches
Keith M. Kirkwood, Dimitris Vlassopoulos and L. Gary Leal
We are beginning to understand the rheological (flow) properties
of polymeric liquids with complicated molecular structures
One outstanding question is why the relaxation behavior following flow
did not seem to agree with the existing theory of Doi and Edwards
Our work shows that the
backbone eventually relaxes like a linear chain and agrees with the theory provided account is taken of the hierarchy of relaxation processes in which the branches relax first,
followed by the backbone. This is reflected by the data for the “damping function” for a wide variety of “comb like” polymers, which agree with theory when scaled to account for the
faster relaxation of the branches