Craze initiation and growth in rigid PVC

The approach adopted here has been to look for discontinuities in the deformation behaviour of UPVC and to attempt to correlate these with the brittle failure process. This approach has the premise that deformation and the initiation of the failure process have a strong interaction, i.e. one perturbs the other. Evidence to support this interaction in UPVC (and other glassy amorphous polymers) is abundant. The connecting link between deformation and failure could well be craze initiation and growth.