Viscoelastic Property of an LDPE Melt in Triangular- and Trapezoidal-Loop Shear Experiment

The time-dependent viscoelastic behaviors of a low-density polyethylene melt (LDPE) in a triangular- and trapezoidal-loop shear experiment reported previously are described here by an integral-type Rivlin–Sawyers (RS) constitutive equation. The linear viscoelasticity of the melt was obtained through a dynamic frequency sweep experiment at a small strain and fitted by a relaxation spectrum. The nonlinear viscoelasticity was characterized by viscosity. All the experimental viscoelastic behaviors of the melt can be divided into two types in terms of the predictions of the RS model: (1) predictable time-dependent viscoelastic behaviors at low shear rates or during short-term shear, and (2) unpredictable shear weakening behavior occurring at the high shear rate of 3–5 s−1 during long-term shear with the characteristic time interval of about 40–100 s. The influence of experimental error caused possibly by inhomogeneous samples on the viscoelasticity of the melt was analyzed, and the large relative error in the experiment is about 10–30%.