It’s important to understand the types of testing that goes into creating the end products we use every day: from the plastic that is designed into cars, to bottles that hold our water, to the equipment used in various sports. Plastics, or thermoplastic materials, are processed as fluids under the effect of temperature and pressure. They can be formed into a wide variety of shapes and tailored for many different applications by means of molding, extrusion, and blowing techniques. However, their flow properties during these processes are complex and affected by many parameters. For this reason it is important to characterize materials and fully understand their rheological properties.
Rheology is a multi-disciplinary science that incorporates fundamental physics and chemistry, as well as many facets of materials engineering. These relationships are so strong that the explanation and prediction of rheological properties is based on knowledge of molecular structure and fundamental laws of physics.