Full-field strain, force and analysis data for revealing relaxation behaviors of main-chain liquid crystal elastomers in the polydomain-monodomain transition

This repository contains example data and analysis scripts for tension tests of soft elastomer strips with stereo digital image correlation (DIC) for full-field strain on the specimen surface, which is associated with a manuscript describing the technique. Specifically, the material of interest is a liquid crystal elastomer - a polymer consisting of nematic ordering of the polymer chains that leads to unique behaviors associated with time- and history-dependent strain redistribution in the crystalline domains of the material. Similar data on a homogenous polymer available commercially is included for comparison. The dataset contains both uniaxial tension and stress relaxation experiments with raw data (e.g., .csv from the load frame and .tiff files from the DIC cameras), processed data (e.g., stereo DIC displacement and strain fields in .gcorrelate and .csv), and analysis results (e.g., .pkl and .tiff). A set of analysis script written in Python to conduct a machine learning-based clustering analysis. It groups regions of coherent surface strain to investigate stress relaxation response and quantify differences in viscoelasticity during the polydomain to monodomain transition. A more common method to qualitatively assess nematic order and domain transition is polarized light imaging, and a example stress relaxation dataset with polarization data is also included.