Paper Number
SM32 

Session
Polymer Solutions & Melts

Title
Predicting flow properties of polymer melts via polymerization kinetic modeling and computational rheology

Presentation Date and Time
February 15, 2017 (Wednesday) 11:40

Track / Room
Track 5 / Snowy Egret

Authors (Click on name to view author profile)

1. Soulages, Johannes M. (ExxonMobil Research and Engineering, Corporate Strategic Research)

Author and Affiliation Lines (in printed abstract book)
Johannes M. Soulages
Corporate Strategic Research, ExxonMobil Research and Engineering, Annandale, NJ 08801

Speaker / Presenter 
Soulages, Johannes M.

Text of Abstract
J. Soulages¹, G. Carri¹, G. Kiss¹, W. Li¹, K. Mao¹, A. Mohan¹, S. Smith¹, T. Sun¹, P. Wright¹, H. Zhou¹, C. Das², and D. Read^2
1Corporate Strategic Research, ²University of Leeds, UK

The processability of plastic - how hard it is to move the molten polymer through extruders and dies and then compress or stretch it into its final form - strongly depends on the molecular weight and architecture of its molecular constituents. Industrially produced polymers generally present broad distributions of branched and linear molecules that are responsible for their unique flow properties. For instance, shear thinning is used to facilitate extrusion and strain hardening to improve bubble stability during film blowing operations.

Recent theoretical advances in computational rheology have enabled the prediction of polymer melt flow performance from molecular structure, leading to the Branch-on-Branch (BoB) model. In addition, the polymer molecular architecture can be predicted using polymerization kinetic modeling.

In this work, we demonstrate a modeling platform combining polymerization and computational rheology models for polyethylene and polypropylene samples. In particular, we relate the resin flow performance to the polymer branching distribution.