Masters Theses

Date of Award

5-2011

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Chemical Engineering

Major Professor

Brian J Edwards

Committee Members

Bamin Khomami, Paul Dalhaimer

Abstract

The polymer industry is an ever growing industry, and, as it grows, companies are continuously looking for ways to study and understand the behaviors of polymers in relation to the processing and production. This is to ensure the production of high quality products and to improve existing products.
An important parameter during polymer processing is temperature. Temperature control affects several rheological parameters such as viscosity, and in turn the quality of the final products. Frictional or viscous heating is a very important part of polymer processing and occurs in almost every polymer processing operation.
The objective of this research is to design the apparatus and setup the equipment to examine the validity of the Theory of Purely Entropic Elasticity (PPE) on non-isothermal flow of concentrated polymeric solutions under a wide range of shear rates. A basic rheological study of the polymer in use is performed. PEE once played an important role in polymer processing. PEE is the assumption that the internal energy of a polymeric material is solely dependent on temperature, and specifically is not dependent on the polymer deformation, as developed by Astarita and co-workers [1-3, 16].
The design and results are presented. Potential improvements and future considerations are also presented.

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