Investigation of Polymer Stretching Instabilities: Application to Film Blowing

Abstract

Abstract Film blowing, as other elongational polymer forming processes, may present marked drawing instabilities leading to unacceptable products. But in film blowing, these instabilities are much more complex than for example in fibre spinning: there is no stabilizing effect of the polymer cooling, and the symmetry of the process may be broken, leading in some processing conditions to so called helical instabilities. Stability of the process has been investigated using a strategy inspired from shell or homogeneisation theory: as the classical approach uses a frame locally affixed to the membrane, the equations of the problem are now written in the cartesian laboratory frame. Making the equations dimensionless introduces naturally a small parameter defined as an aspect ratio (ratio of the film thickness to the bubble radius). Kinematic and stress variables are expanded as a function of this small parameter and introduced in the equations. It leads classically to a sequence of equations at successive orders. This strategy is used to obtain a time dependent membrane model. The stationary solution is equivalent to the one obtained using the classical approach. This model allows to develop a stability analysis, first in the axisymmetric case and then in the non axisymmetric one. Even a crude Newtonian temperature dependent rheology allows to capture qualitatively the observed instability phenomena.