extrusion foaming
actually, this is not new. it was just a copy of others’ design. However, it is a lab-scale extrusion system with gas dosing via a MFC, screw design for foaming (with enhanced mixing and dynamic seals), a heat exchanger for cooling the polymer/gas solution, and a nucleation nozzle. The heat exchanger may work as an in-line capillary rheometer for measuring rheological properties of polymer/gas solutions.
the same pieces can be placed downstream of a pilot scale extruder with screw design for foaming based on a Berstorff ZE 25
batch foaming
mini batch – Tammaro et al. J. Cell Plast., 2015
multi-foaming batch – Marrazzo et al. J. Cell. Plast., 2008
visual foaming batch – Tammaro et al. J. Chem. Eng., 2015