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.