Yes / Polymer extrusion is an energy intensive production process and process energy e ciency has become a key concern in the current
industry with the pressure of reducing the global carbon footprint. Here, knowledge of the pattern of energy usage and losses
of each component in the plant is highly useful in the process energy optimization. Moreover, it is essential to maintain the
melt quality while improving the energy e ciency in polymer processing. In this work, an investigation was made on the total
energy consumption, drive motor energy consumption, power factor and the melt temperature profile across the die melt flow
(as an indication of the melt thermal quality) of an industrial scale extruder with three di erent screw geometries, three polymer
types and wide range of processing conditions (altogether 135 di erent processing situations were observed). This aims to widen
the knowledge on process energy and thermal behaviors while exploring possible correlation/s between energy demand and melt
quality (in terms of melt temperature fluctuations across the melt flow). The results showed that the level and fluctuations of the
extruder’s power factor is particularly dependent upon the material being processed. Moreover, it seems that there is a relation
between the level of energy demand of the heaters and the level of melt temperature fluctuations. While the extruder specific energy
consumption decreases with increasing screw speed, specific energy consumption of the drive motor may have either increasing
or decreasing behavior. Overall, this study provides new insights in a wide range on process energy demand and melt thermal
quality in polymer extrusion. Moreover, further research is recommended to establish strong correlation/s between process energy
consumption and melt thermal quality which should help to enhance process control and hence the product quality in single screw
polymer extrusion.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/8772 |
| Date | 06 July 2016 |
| Creators | Abeykoon, Chamil, Kelly, Adrian L., Brown, Elaine C., Coates, Philip D. |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, Accepted Manuscript |
| Rights | (c) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. Reproduced in accordance with the publisher's selfarchiving policy. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
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