Abstract:Crazing is a special phenomenon in glassy polymers. It concerns not only themechanism of plastic deformation and toughness, but also the damagemechanism of polymers, which is a bridge to link the micromechanism ofdamage and macroscopic failure of polymers. The initiation, growth andbreakdown of craze are open problems for scientists of materials scienceand solid mechanics. Although extensive researches have be devoted to thistopic and considerable advances in the experimental, theoretical andnumerical investigations have been made in the past decades, there isstill no systematic theoretical framework to describe the crazing ofpolymers, and people have just started to link the fundamental knowledge ofmicromechanics to the phenomenon of crazing of polymers,and this kind of studies have not yet played a key role in guiding the blend design. Inthis paper, we introduce the advances in polymer crazing in thepast decade. A brief introduction to the structure, the initiation criterion, thegrowth and the breakdown of crazing is presented first. Emphasis of thepaper is on the recent advances of the applications offracture mechanics, damage mechanics, micromechanics and moleculardynamics in the studies on the crazing of glassy polymers.