Mechanical and dielectric relaxations in liquid crystalline copolyesters

Abstract

Abstract Dynamic mechanical measurements in tension and torsion on oriented tapes and monofilaments of a range of liquid crystalline polyesters have been combined with dielectric measurements to obtain a molecular understanding of the relaxation processes. This paper extends our previous work [1,2,3] on polyesters of hydroxybenzoic acid (HBA) and hydroxynaphthoic acid (HNA) to related polymers containing dihydroxynaphthalene (DHN) and terephthalic acid (TPA) or biphenyl (BP) and TPA in place of the HNA. It confirms the association of the β and γ processes with naphthyl and phenyl moieties but shows that the processes cannot be due simply to the independent motions of single units.