Rheological Behaviour of Polypropylene Through Extrusion and Capillary Rheometry

Abstract

For the past decade, polypropylene (PP) has become one of the most widely use polyolefin especially for intensive activities in research, product development and commercialization. The factor is strongly contributed by the high demands and usage predominantly in food packaging, automotive industries, fabrication of electric and electronic components and currently its utilization in building structural component for civil needs. Despite their variety in terms of its applications, PP has to be brought into melted stage first before it can be transformed into desired shapes. PP possesses relatively high melting point, low density, high tensile modulus and it is relatively low-priced compared to other thermoplastics. In addition, commercial PP consists of generally linear molecular structure thus it can provide low melt strength and exhibits no strain hardening behaviour in the melted stage. This suggests that PP is suitable for injection moulding, blow moulding and extrusion processing techniques (Rahima et al., 2011).