Adapting a Capillary Rheometer for Research on Polymer Melt Interfaces

Interfaces between immiscible polymers are widely known to be the origin of premature failure in multilayers and blends. Developing a small-scale, continuous method to fabricate interfaces from polymer melts with short contact times to simulate industrial coextrusion is critical for assessing new materials, polymeric systems, and processing conditions. Here we develop a miniature coextrusion die that can be fitted to a twin bore capillary rheometer for precise temperature and contact time control from 4.4 to 440 s. The design of the feedblock, stacker, manifold, and land zones was optimized via flow simulation software to allow bilayer coextrusion with minimal (