LAUSR

Thermoplastic elastomers are elastomeric materials which contain hard domains as physical cross-linking for rubbery chains. Therefore, the hard domains are required permanently rigid. Nevertheless, we have found experimentally deformation of the hard domains upon uniaxial stretching of the thermoplastic elastomer films. In this paper, we report experimental results of deformation of glassy spherical microdomains in elastomeric triblock copolymer films upon uniaxial stretching, as revealed by two-dimensional small-angle X-ray scattering (2d-SAXS) measurements. Actually, shifts of the peak position of the particle scattering toward lower and higher q-regions were detected for q directions parallel and perpendicular to the stretching direction (SD), respectively, where q stands for the scattering vector. By assuming that spheres simply deformed into prolate spheroids with its major axis parallel to SD, 1d-SAXS profiles measured at several strains were successfully reproduced with model calculation of the 1d-...