An experimental study on process-oriented scale-up/scale-down in blown film extrusion

The transfer of experimental test results from a small-scale system to a large-scale production system is known as scale-up or, conversely, scale-down. For film-producing companies, scale-up is a common procedure in the development process of new composite films or material recipes, where the main objective is to obtain equal film properties in the laboratory and the production environment. The process-oriented scale-up / scale-down strategy has been developed as a systematic and practicable approach for the blown film extrusion process. For the recent study, a scale-down scenario with a scaling factor k=1/8 is investigated and the results are compared with a previous study (k=1/10). Measured mechanical properties of produced film samples serve as a basis to confirm the feasibility of the approach and the reproducibility of the experimental results. The corresponding industrial production process (> 800 kg/h) determines the underlying process conditions.