COMPARISON OF DRY BLENDING-BASED AND MELT COMPOUNDING-BASED ROTOMOLDING TECHNIQUES FOR LLDPE FOAMS

摘要

This paper presents a melt compounding based rotational foam molding technique for production of fine-celled LLDPE foams in comparison with the dry blending based technique. A chemical blowing agent (CBA) is well dispersed in the LLDPE matrix in a compounder while preventing the predecomposition of the CBA. The compounded pellets are then rotationally molded to produce foams. The morphology of the LLDPE foams obtained in such a way was investigated at various processing conditions. The quality of the cell structures obtained in melt compounding based rotational foam molding was superior to that of the dry-blended based in terms of cell size, cell population density and volume expansion ratio. The results indicate that the cell nucleation mechanism in the compounding based technique is superior and that the scheme of well distributing the CBA particles in the polymer matrix by compounding is effective to achieve better nucleation of cells compared to the dry blending technique.