On the burst of branched polymer melts during inflation

Two molten low-density polyethylene melts, shaped as plates, have been inflated into a circular cylinder during isothermal conditions. Lowering the inflation rates allow the plates to be inflated into a larger volume of the cylinder before bursting. Numerical simulations of the inflations have been performed, using a time-strain separable constitutive K-BKZ equation based on the potential function from the Doi-Edwards theory. The material parameters in the constitutive model are based on liner viscoelastic and time dependent uniaxial elongational viscosities. The numerical calculations show quantitative agreement with the experiments, including the appearance of the burst, for a wide range of experimental conditions. This strongly suggests that the initiation of the burst in the polymer melts is a hydrodynamic phenomenon.