Solidification behavior of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) during injection molding: Correlation between crystallization kinetics and thermal gradient field

This work mainly investigated the effect of thermal field on the crystallization kinetics of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) during injection molding (IM) process. The thickness X = 0.4 was found to be a crucial location heavily influenced by thermal conduction. The temperature decay tended to be stable, with limited variation of the crystallization rate when X > 0.4. It was observed that the crystallization rate was in good proportion to the cooling rate (ϕ). Our experimental finding showed that the consequence of relative crystallinity (χ) was in agreement with that of the secondary temperature difference (STD). This study is practically significant to the further investigation on the relationship among "processing-structure-property" of polymeric materials.