Extrusion compounding and injection moulding

This chapter gives a brief introduction of extrusion compounding and injection moulding processes since they are most often used to manufacture short fibre reinforced thermoplastic composites. The influences of various processing parameters including holding pressure, back pressure, screw speed, melt temperature and barrel temperature profile, etc., on the microstructures (fibre length distribution and fibre orientation distribution) and morphology (layered structure, etc.) are discussed.