Polymer Processing Instabilities: Control and Understanding offers a
practical understanding of the various flows that occur during the
processing of polymer melts. The book pays particular attention to flow
instabilities that affect the rate of production and the methods used to
prevent and eliminate flow instabilities in order to increase production
rates and enhance manufacturing efficiency.
Polymer Processing Instabilities: Control and Understanding summarizes
experimental observations of flow instabilities that occur in numerous
processing operations such as extrusion, injection molding, fiber
spinning, film casting, and film blowing for a wide range of materials,
including most commodity polymers that are processed as melts at
temperatures above their melting point or as concentrated solutions at
lower temperatures. The book first presents the fundamental principles
in rheology and flow instabilities. It relates the operating conditions
with flow curves, the critical wall shear stress for the onset of the
instabilities, and new visualization techniques with numerical modeling
and molecular structure. It reviews one-dimensional phenomenological
relaxation/oscillation models describing the experimental pressure and
flow rate oscillations, analyzes the gross melt fracture (GMF)
instability, and examines how traditional and non-traditional processing
aids eliminate melt fracture and improve polymer processability. It
supplies a numerical approach for the investigation of the linear
viscoelastic stability behavior of simplified injection molding flows
and examines a newly discovered family of instabilities that occur in
co-extrusion.
Polymer Processing Instabilities: Control and Understanding is unique in
that it fills a gap in the polymer processing literature where polymer
flow instabilities are not treated in-depth in any book. It summarizes
state-of-the-art developments in the field, particularly those of the
last ten years, and contains significant data based on this research.
