An Experimental Investigation on Surface Quality Extruded Wood-Polypropylene Composite

摘要

This paper presents an experimental study on surface quality (roughness) for extruded wood plastic composites (WPC) in an extrusion process. A problem that usually occurs in production of extruded parts of polymeric materials, and in special case of WPC, is flow instabilities at the extrusion die exit. The instabilities lead to production of profiles with unacceptable surface quality. In this paper, the influences of the important material and process parameters on the surface quality are investigated. The variable parameters were selected as wood content, polymer melt flow index (MFI), screw speed, melt temperature, die diameter and finally length-to-diameter ratio of the die land. The experiments specified that increasing die land length-to-diameter ratio (L/D), die temperature and wood content and decreasing screw speed and polymer MFI lead to improve the surface quality.