On-Line measurement of parison geometry during blow molding: Parison swelling for three high-density polyethylenes with different molecular weights and molecular weight distributions

An image analysis technique has been developed to measure diameter and thickness distribution of a parison during the extrusion stage in blow molding. The system operates on-line during extrusion on any commercial blow-molding machine. The system has been developed to help development of new blow-molding resins by increasing our understanding of the connection between polymer structure and parison shape. The system can also be used for die design during optimization of a production process. The combined use of experimental design and multivariate projection techniques makes this an efficient tool for the practical processing engineer. Experiments done on three high-density polyethylene blow-molding resins show the importance of measuring the time dependence of the diameter and thickness distribution under different extrusion conditions for a given polymer. Our results show that many of the swell and sag related properties we see cannot be directly inferred from standard laboratory swell-experiments.