Research On Extrusion Energy Consumption Of Co-rotating Inter-meshing Twin-screw Extruder

Twin-screw extruder occupies an important position in polymer processing, and its energy consumption has been drawn more attention.Three sections of co-rotating twin-screw extruder were researched through experiment in this paper, which include solid conveying section, melting section and melt conveying section. And three kinds of conventional screw element were adopted in solid conveying section, five groups of different combination of kneading block elements were adopted in melting section and three kinds of new screw elements were adopted in melt conveying section. Meanwhile, the variation of extrusion energy consumption has been studied with ingredient of EPDM in PP/EPDM blend.POLYFLOW has been used to simulate and analysis flow field of three kinds of screw configurations in the melt conveying section in this paper.The experimental results show that:the energy consumption in the solid conveying section decreased with the increase of lead of the screw element; in melting section, different energy has been consumed from diverse combination of kneading block elements; in melt conveying section, compared with feeding capacity, more effect to extruder power is generated from extruder screw rotation speed, and energy will be consumed with different functions of the screw element; the distribution of energy consumption have been determined through experiment,, and it has also been confirmed that the erengy consumption in the melting section is largest; Under the premise of mixed effect, extruder energy consumption can be reduced by choosing reasonable screw elements.In the blend under the formulation experiment, the energy consumption is lowest when the content of EPDM is20%. It shows that there has been no interaction between the independent variable about extruder screw speed and feeding capacity through fitting the energy consumption equation, and a linear relationship is existed between energy consumption. During the research of the relationship between screw configuration and energy consumption, it has obtained that the degree of fullness of screw element increases with the rising of staggered angle of kneading block, so as to make the energy consumption increase.Simulation results show that:distributive mixing ability of element of S, polygon, TME decreased in turn; and dispersive mixing ability of the element of TME, polygon, S decreased in turn; the larger is the shear stress and the larger is the energy consumption, the large of the pressure difference between output and input and the large is the energy consumption, but the larger is the backflow and the smaller is the erengy consumption.