Modeling melt conveying and power consumption of co-rotating twin-screw extruder kneading blocks: Part A. Data generation
Sprache des Titels:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
Mathematical models of polymer melt flow in co-rotating twin-screw extruders are
crucial to screw design and predict processing characteristics, such as pressure distribution,
back-pressure lengths, degree of filling, melt-temperature increase, and drive
power. Twin-screw modeling focuses predominantly on conveying elements, and
kneading blocks are commonly represented with fictitious continuous flights, which
significantly simplifies geometry and ignores considerable leakage flow. This work
(Part A) presents a comprehensive analysis of the conveying characteristics and
power demands of fully intermeshing co-rotating twin-screw extruder kneading
blocks that considers the complex three-dimensional geometry without geometrical
simplifications. This analysis comprises the following steps: (1) dimensionless
description of the geometry, (2) simplification of the governing equations, (3) formulation
of novel dimensionless conveying and power parameters, and (4) a parametric
design study with the novel approach of using the characteristic angular screw position,
which avoids complex numerical algorithms and drastically reduces the computation
required. Our comprehensive parametric design study included 1536
independent design points?a vast amount of data that revealed various effects that
are highlighted in this work, including new findings on the interactions between
geometry and conveying and power parameters. The obtained results serve, for
example, as the basis for screw design, optimizations, scale-up, and soft sensors.