Theoretical And Experimental Study Of TME In Intermeshing Co-Rotating Twin-Screw Extrusion

In this paper, a kind of new screw element—TME(Turbine mixing elements) was designed and the optimization of the tooth figure and the tooth number was carried out, so the best TME was obtained. Then the effect of screw configuration with TME on mixing characteristic and transportation capacity in the co-rotating twin-screw extruder was analyzed, which were based on the same simulation conditions. And the best type of the screw was gained. With that a three dimensional flow field simulation of TME was carried out by the ANSYS FEM package. Pressure profile, velocity profile and viscosity profile were obtained. Post-processing program was developed to calculate throughput, backflow ratio, shear rate and shear stress. The mixing ability of TME was also analyzed. Then a comparison was made between the flow fields of straight TME and bevel TME under the same condition. The results were: granules in bevel TME distributed more uniformly than that in straight TME, bevel TME had less output than straight TME with the same pressure difference, dispersive mixing ability of bevel TME was equivalent to that of straight TME. And the result can also be concluded that several short mixing zones had better mixing ability than a whole long mixing zone.Experiments were performed to testify the flow field simulation results of the TME It proved that the flow field simulation with ANSYS was feasible. The results showed that TME had some transportation capacity, and its mixing ability was improved a lot. And the phenomena of mixing in TME was watched and recorded in the experiments. TME was suitable to filling modification process .