A matricial approach of fibre breakage in twin-screw extrusion of glass fibres reinforced thermoplastics

Limiting fibre breakage during composite processing is a crucial issue. The purpose of this paper is to predict the evolution of the fibre-length distribution along a twin-screw extruder. This approach relies on using a fragmentation matrix to describe changes in the fibre-length distribution. The flow parameters in the screw elements are obtained using the simulation software Ludovic. Evolution of an initial fibre-length distribution for several processing conditions was computed and the results were compared with experimental values. The computation gives satisfying results, even though more comparisons with experiments would be necessary. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.