AbstractDeformation of polyethylene in environmental stress cracking (ESC) agents results in changes in both the mechanism of deformation and structure of the resulting drawn material. Stress‐cracked failure surfaces are highly fibrillar, the fibrils having less elastic recovery than those in samples drawn in air. In thin films drawn in ESC agents, small blocks of the lamellae remain undrawn and attached to the fibrils drawn across micronecks. The ESC agents are suggested to weaken the cohesion between the fibrils in samples drawn beyond yield as well as the cohesion between mosaic blocks or similar structural elements in the original lamellae as they are being reoriented to form the fibrils. The stress is thus supported by a number of independent, nonuniform fibrils rather than a coherent structure; the weakest of these fibrils fail in turn as the crack propagates through the sampl
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