The strain properties of polymer systems under shear and tension have been investigated with chemical fi bers formed by the wet method. The main methods of expressing the stresses and strains are examined. It is shown that the stretching of freshly prepared fi ber during the formation process is related less with the section of steady fl ow in a capillary and more with the sections of entry and exit from the spinneret (capillary). It is shown that the method of forming chemical fi bers can be used to determine the entry and exit end corrections.Rheomechanical studies of jet (fi ber) stretching in a precipitation bath directly during chemical fi ber formation from polymer solutions become important for establishing the formation mechanisms, since this method of investigation makes it possible to obtain at the same time information on the viscous and elastic properties of the polymer system used. Only when fi ber is formed by stretching a fi ber jet in a precipitation bath is it possible to infl uence actively a shear fl ow in the spinneret channel (capillary), which makes it possible to compare the strain due to shear and tension and to obtain the missing information on each of them. A distinguishing feature of shear strain in a spinneret channel is that it is uniquely determined by the gradient of the shear velocity. For stretching, such uniqueness does not exist, since up to now different methods exist for expressing the stress and strain and they give different results.Experimental data indicating a close relation between shear and tension has been obtained in previous work [1]. It was established that for the formation of fi bers in "rigid" baths (in water) the coeffi cients of viscosity under shear v and tension k are observed to be equal to one another, i.e., v = k. A similar relation is also noted for the coeffi cients of elasticity e and e, i.e., e = e. The present article presents work on establishing a relation between the main strain characteristics determining shear and tension.We shall examine shear and tension separately. Shear. It has been shown [2] that to extrude a polymer system in the viscoelastic state through a spinneret the total pressure P o is comprised of the viscous P v and elastic P e components, i.e., P o = P v + P e . Similarly, shear stresses can be expressed as a sum of the appropriate components:o , and e = e / o . In these equations G R and R are the equilibrium values of the shear modulus and the relaxation time [2], q o is the gradient of the shear velocity and the relaxation time [2], and q o is the gradient of the shear velocity determined from the relationwhere Q o is the total consumption of the polymer solution, o is the average fl ow velocity, and R o is the radius of a spinneret opening. Tension. Just as for shear, we shall take the balance of forces as the starting point to study the main mechanisms of stretching of a freshly formed fi ber jet. We shall assume that the main forces acting on a spinneret during stretching of a freshly formed fi ber jet are ...