Investigation of Thermal Degradation of Branched Polypropylene via Rheology

In this work, virgin as well as thermally degraded branched polypropylenes were investigated by using rotational and Sentmanat extensional rheometers. Based on the shear and extensional rheology data it was deduced that both chain scission and chain branching takes place during thermal degradation of the tested polypropylene. It was found that simple phenomenological constitutive equations such as Generalized Newtonian law and modified White Metzner model can be used to describe the measured steady state shear and uniaxial extensional viscosity data as well as for the simple quantification of the extensional strain hardening via their model parameters.