Poly(Lactic Acid): Flow-Induced Crystallization

Poly(lactic acid) is surely one of the most interesting commercially available biodegradable polymers. Being a slowly crystallizing material, it generally does not have the time to crystallize at the cooling rates involved in the common processing techniques. However, the properties induced by crystallinity are extremely interesting for tuning the characteristics of the obtained parts, and this leads the research to find the routes to an enhancement of PLA crystallization kinetics. During processing, polymer melts are subjected to very high deformation rates, and the stretch resulting from this orientation gives rise to shorter crystallization times and also to peculiar crystalline structures. The so-called flow-induced crystallization is therefore a phenomenon that for PLA can be considered strategic toward the realization of parts with enhanced properties. In this work, a state of the art on flow-induced crystallization of PLA is presented.