THE MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF MEDIUM MOLECULAR WEIGHT HIGHDENSITY POLYETHYLENE FILMS: MAKING THE LINK BETWEEN ORIENTATION AND RHEOLOGY

摘要

This paper describes a study of the mechanical properties of films produced from five different medium molecular weight homopolymer high density polyethylene resins. The machine direction (MD) tear strength and dart impact strength of these films track together. This is due to the tendency of these films to fail during dart impact testing by tearing in the machine direction. The ratio of MD and transverse direction (TD) tear properties correlates with low frequency linear viscoelastic measurements. There is a straightforward relationship between melt index measurements and low frequency rheology for the resins in our study, which relates film properties directly to readily available resin properties and film processing conditions.