Monitoring and viscosity identification via temperature measurement on a polymer injection molding line

Abstract

Recent studies emphasize the importance of monitoring equipment/strategy for energy efficiency and quality control of polymer processing. New devices and new methods are proposed for temperature and viscosity measurements on a polymer production line. In this paper, an annular measuring device is used on an injection molding machine to detect material changes through temperature measurement. When the material becomes more viscous, the melt temperature increases due to the viscous dissipation in the production line. An original inverse method based on the viscous dissipation phenomenon is proposed for viscosity identification using temperature measurements of the annular device. The identification process successfully distinguishes the difference in viscosity between two different polymers, and the identification results are in good agreement with other viscosity curves available from the literature.