Experimental Study and Modeling of Flow Behavior and Orientation Kinetics of Layered Silicate/Polypropylene Nanocomposites in Start-up of Shear Flows

Abstract

Abstract Effects of organoclay contents on the startup flow properties of layered nano-scale particles in the simple shear mode are investigated. The addition of small amounts of nanoclays to polypropylene melts was found to dramatically change the flow characteristics and creates stress overshoots at large shear rates. A rheological model, initially developed for studying the motion of a group of symmetric ellipsoid particles in viscoelastic fluids was used to describe the orientation state of the uniformly dispersed suspensions of layered silicate in polypropylene melts. The effects of shear, particle loadings, particle interactions, flow reversal and rest time after cession of shear are studied and discussed according to our experimental observations and model predictions. It is shown that another diffusion term in the governing equation for the particles can be used to predict the properties by applying the rest time which was found to change the orientation of particles and shifts it to more isotropic microstructures. The experimental results of the startup viscosity are reasonably well predicted by the model at the three shear rates tested.