Development and Prototyping of Extrusion Dies for Advanced Plastic Sheets and Thin Film Production

Ministry of Education and Science - Grant Funding 2018-2020

In Kazakhstan, a plant for producing 18 tons of thin films per year, as well as producing 48 million polypropylene bags per year is in operation since 2012. In addition, the integrated gas chemical complex in West Kazakhstan has the capacity of producing polyethylene and polypropylene pellets as well as some plastic films. The goal of this project is to adapt and develop the polymer extrusion technology for the local industry and provide optimal design of extrusion dies for the purpose of processing the polyethylene and polypropylene (PP) resins produced in Kazakhstan into valuable products as separator of Li-ion batteries, plastic thin films, to create prototypes of these designed die heads, and to perform experimental validations of the designs. The first part of this project is to establish suitable mathematical models for modeling the rheology of polymer materials in certain thermal conditions from measured data. The results will be compared with and validated through the comparison with simulation results from commercial software packages as well as with experimental results. The second part is to make our models and data usable for our numerical scheme to produce design outputs for the prototyping purpose.