Crystallinity and Property Enhancements in Neat Polylactic Acid by Chilled Extrusion: Solid-State Shear Pulverization and Solid-State/Melt Extrusion

Polylactic acid (PLA) is a biopolymer of significant interest to both industry and the scientific community, but an incomplete understanding of the practical processing-structure-property relations is limiting its application range. The study applies alternative, chilled extrusion technologies called solid-state shear pulverization (SSSP) and solid-state/melt extrusion (SSME) to neat, commercial PLA, and investigates the effect of the resulting morphological features upon the thermomechanical behavior. Although conventional, heated twin-screw extrusion leads to significant thermal degradation of PLA chains, which in turn facilitates crystal growth due to enhanced chain mobility, chilled SSSP imparts chain defects and branching, which serve as heterogeneous nucleation sites in the polymer and promotes the formation of a rigid amorphous phase. A hybrid SSME process brings unique interplay of both chain architecture effects, resulting in a synergistic thermomechanical behavior involving the alpha' crystal polymorph formation. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 59:E286-E295, 2019. (c) 2019 Society of Plastics Engineers