Extrudate swell of high density polyethylene in capillary and slit dies

The analysis of extrudate swell in polymer melts is of great importance in many polymer processing operations and has been the subject of interest both experimentally and numerically. The main objectives of this research work are to obtain systematic and reliable extrudate swell data of a high molecular weight HDPE, to identify a suitable constitutive model that can precisely represent extrudate swell phenomena and to predict extrudate swell accurately under various processing and operating conditions. A novel extrudate swell measuring system with an online data acquisition system is designed for the present work. This system allows one to measure extrudate swell profile under different conditions such as steady state or transient, gravity free, isothermal and non-isothermal conditions. Further, the set-up is suitable for both capillary and slit extrudates. A comprehensive analysis on the applicability and validity of various rheological (integral and differential/molecular) models in describing extrudate swell of a highly viscoelastic HDPE polymer over a broad range of shear rates (5 to 100s-¹) is carried out using FEM based ANSYS POLYFLOW®. The simulation results indicated that the integral constitutive equations of K-BKZ type can account for the significant memory effects of viscoelastic polymer melts such as HDPE. Overprediction of extrudate swell by the integral K-BKZ model invoked the importance of obtaining non-linear viscoelastic properties for a broader range of deformations/deformation rates. The newly available CPP fixture from AntonPaar is used to procure such non-linear viscoelastic data and thus to determine the accurate damping function. The simulation results of extrudate swell in capillary and slit dies are in good agreement with the experimental measurements using the newly determined damping function. In addition, non-isothermal extrudate swell of the HDPE polymer is studied using the pseudo-time integral K-BKZ Wagner (i.e., the non-isothermal form) model with the differential Nakamura equation for the crystallization kinetics. The model is implemented in ANSYS POLYFLOW®. Extrudate swell measurements are obtained by extruding the polymer melt at 200ºC through long capillary and slit dies to ambient air at 25ºC and 110ºC. The numerical results are found to be in very good agreement with the experimental observations.Applied Science, Faculty ofChemical and Biological Engineering, Department ofGraduat