  The glass transition in amorphous poly(ethylene terephthalate) is studied by
thermally stimulated depolarization currents (TSDC) and differential scanning
calorimetry (DSC). The ability of TSDC to decompose a distributed relaxation,
as the glass transition, into its elementary components is demonstrated. Two
polarization techniques, windows polarization (WP) and non-isothermal windows
polarization (NIW), are employed to assess the influence of thermal history in
the results. The Tool-Narayanaswami-Moynihan (TNM) model has been used to fit
the TSDC spectra. The most important contributions to the relaxation comes from
modes with non-linearity (x) around 0.7. Activation energies yield by this
model are located around 1eV for polarization temperature (Tp) below 50C and
they raise up to values higher than 8eV as Tp increases (up to 80C). There are
few differences between results obtained with WP and NIW but, nonetheless,
these are discussed. The obtained kinetic parameters are tested against DSC
results in several conditions. Calculated DSC curves at several cooling and
heating rates can reproduce qualitatively experimental DSC results. These
results also demonstrate that modelization of the non-equilibrium kinetics
involved in TSDC spectroscopy is a useful experimental tool for glass
transition studies in polar polymers.
