Control of rotation extrusion over shish-kebab crystal alignment in polyethylene pipe and its effect on the pipe's crack resistance

Abstract

A self-designed rotation extrusion system was adopted to extrude polyethylene (PE) pipe. The experimental results showed that when the mandrel and die rotated in the same directions during the PE pipe extrusion, apart from the axial stress, all polymer melts in PE pipes were also subjected to the hoop stress so that the formed shish-kebab crystal in the whole pipe deviated from the axial direction greatly, which was further fixed by the double cooling on both inner and outer walls. As a result, the PE pipe with better resistance to slow crack growth was prepared. As compared to the PE pipe produced by the convention extrusion, the crack initiation time of the PE pipe manufactured by the novel method increased from 27 to 174 h, by 544%. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci., 2013