SIMULATION OF EPP BEAD MANUFACTURING IN BATCH FOAMING PROCESS THROUGH HIGH PRESSURE DIFFERENTIAL SCANNING CALORIMETER (HPDSC)

摘要

To simulate the evolution of the melting behavior of polypropylene (PP) during the manufacturing of expanded PP bead foams (EPP) through batch process, a high pressure differential scanning calorimeter (HP-DSC) machine was used. The EPP bead foam has two original melting peaks which are suitable for bead foams during the steam chest molding process to produce final products with well sintered beads and good firmness. The influence of various saturation temperatures, time, and pressure on the double crystal melting peak creation is investigated in this work. The results can bring an overestimation of the optimized parameters for the batch process.