Study On Driving Power Consumption Of Solid Conveying And Melting Process In Conical Twin-Screw Extruder

With the development of plastics industry, conical twin-screw extruders are expanding rapidly and applied widely. But at present, the open literature related to their studies is few in the world. It is significant to study on the experiment and basic theory about conical twin-screw extrusion.In this paper, driving power consumption of the solid conveying and melting process in conical twin-screw extruder was studied.At first, the present conical twin-screw extruder was refitted. Many simulative experiments for powder polymer in solid conveying zone were made and observed with the transparent barrel. The factual experiments for solid conveying and melting were also made. According to the experimental data, the influences of parameters such as temperature, screw rotate speed, and screw series on the extrusion processing and driving consumption were analyzed.Based on the theory of non-plug solid conveying in single screw extruder, the influence of intermeshing zone was taken into account at the same time, theoretical models of two conveying zones were established for solid conveying when feeding with powder polymer. The concept of loose particles in structural mechanics was considered in this paper.According to actual geometric figure, three-dimensional models in melting process of different conical twin-screw series were performed respectively with a finite element package, ANSYS. Based on the calculated pressure field and velocity field, the power consumption was obtained through programming. The influences of different geometric variables and operational conditions, such as screw pitch, screw rotate speed, pressure difference, stagger angle and clearance on power consumption were also analyzed.Anyhow, here some elementary studies of the solid conveying and melting process about conical twin-screw extrusion were proposed. It made a good basis for further study in future.