and E. A. RogovaThe rheological properties of concentrated solutions of polyacrylonitrile in dimethyl sulfoxide are studied in steady and dynamic regimes of shear fl ow as a function of the molecular-mass characteristics of the polymer. It is found that as the molecular mass of PAN increases, the elastic component of the solution viscosity increases more rapidly than the viscous component; this is one of the main reasons for the instability of the formation and structural nonuniformity of fi bers.The solvent of greatest interest for the production of polyacrylotrile (PAN) fi bers is dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO). Although DMSO is a weaker solvent than dimethylformamide (DMFA) and its polymerization rate lower than that of the solutions of related salts, DMSO possesses a number of important properties, specifi cally, lower toxicity and weaker corrosive activity.One of the most important indicators, characterizing the technological properties of spinning (concentrated) polymer solutions is their rheological behavior. Rheological studies of PAN solutions in different solvents are the subject of many publications [1-3]. However, these studies were performed using PAN with a relatively low molecular weight (ordinarily, not exceeding 100000-150000), while it is known from published and patent data [4,5] that the larger molecular weight of a polymer the stronger, as a rule, the obtained fi ber is. In addition, in these studies largely only the viscous properties of the solutions were studied, while the elastic (high-elastic) properties were either not evaluated at all or only indirectly.In the present work the ratio of the viscous and elastic components of the total viscosity of concentrated solutions of PAN in DMSO and how the molecular mass (MM) and the molecular-mass distribution (MMD) of the polymer affect them were studied.PAN with different molecular characteristics was synthesized under laboratory conditions by means of radical polymerization in a DMSO solution in the presence of an initiator --azo-iso-butyric acid dinitrile (porphor). After removal of the unreacted monomers concentrated PAN solutions were obtained and subjected to rheological tests on a RheoStress-1 (Haake Company, Germany) rheometer using a cone-plane measuring system in two regimes of shear motion: steady and dynamic. Viscosity curves, which were used to determine the maximum Newtonian viscosity for the solutions, were obtained in the steady fl ow regime. The viscoelastic characteristics of concentrated solutions were studied in the dynamic regime.The molecular characteristics of the synthesized samples of the polymer were determined by means of viscosimetry of dilute solutions of PAN in DMFA and gel-permeation chromatography. The average-viscosity MM (M v ) of polyacrylonitrile was calculated from the equation [] = 5.33 · 10 −4 M v 0.69 , where [] is the characteristic viscosity measured with a SCHOT automatic viscosimeter.The molecular-mass characteristics of PAN --average-number M n , average-weight M w , molecular mass, and polydispersity in...