Viscous Dissipation of Polymer Melt in Micro Channels and Macro Channels

Abstract

Viscous dissipation is the key factor impacting flowing characteristics of polymer melt. In order to study the difference between micro scale and macro scale, experimental studies of viscous dissipation at various shear rate were investigated with several polymers, including PMMA and HDPE, at different temperature when melts flow through 1000μm,500μm,350μm diameter channels of identical aspects ratio in the paper. The results indicate that the temperature rises caused by viscous dissipation increase with increasing shear rate and the temperature rise for some shear rate decreases with increasing melts temperature. The temperature rises decrease significantly with the reduction of the characteristic size of micro channel at the same shear rate. However, the average temperature rises per unit length increase when the character size of channel decreases. This indicates the shear friction gradually increases with the decrease of channel characteristic size. Therefore polymer melt viscous dissipation effects of micro scale dimensions are different from that of macro-scale dimensions.