Linking polymer architecture to bubble shape in LDPE film blowing through multistage modeling

Abstract

To meet the challenge of efficient modeling of film blowing with realistic constitutive equations for commercial thermoplastic melts, we present a multistage optimization modeling framework that integrates polymerization reaction modeling, rheology modeling, and bubble-shape prediction. A direct link is thereby created between the polymer architecture and the bubble shape of low-density polyethylene (LDPE) through a three-stage modeling protocol. Stage 1 aims to get complete polymer structure information from a limited set of linear and nonlinear rheological data and the measured averaged molecular weight. An optimization loop uses the Tobita algorithm for polymer reaction and the BoB model for rheology to minimize the deviation between experimental data and model predictions. Stage 2 is designed to obtain a representative reduced ensemble of LDPE in the Rolie-double-poly (RDP) model to reduce the computational cost of rheology calculations during processing. The parameters of the reduced molecular components are obtained by fitting the RDP model to a wide range of rheology data predicted by the BoB model applied to the full ensemble of polymer architectures obtained in stage 1. In stage 3, the reduced-ensemble RDP model is coupled to measured temperature profiles using time–temperature superposition, and the bubble shape and strain rate history of a fluid particle in the bubble are obtained by minimizing error in the momentum balance equations. We show that each stage of the process yields successful fitting, and at the end, we obtain an a priori prediction of height-dependent bubble radius and velocity in agreement with experiment. With this multistage optimization strategy, we link the polymer compositions to the bubble properties during the film blowing of LDPE.