Barrel material selection for twin screw extrusion of breakfast cereal

The twin screw extruder is the heart of a continuous breakfast cereal manufacturing process. Since manufacturers are often put into a position whereas new assets can not be justified outright for incremental throughput over time, currently installed extruders are modified with higher horsepower motors, bigger gear drives, and finally, new barrel materials. The breakfast cereal manufacturing industry, having seen a steady annual growth of 3% to 5% over the last decade, has been put into a position of identifying and utilizing a material that will increase the life expectancy of their extruder barrels while delivering increased throughput requirements. With these increased throughputs, the barrels are experiencing increased adhesive, abrasive, and corrosive wear that limits uptime of the extruder. This report will review two common extruder barrel materials used in breakfast cereal manufacturing applications and provide a performance evaluation of these two materials.