EVALUATION OF THE FAN TECHNIQUE FOR PROFILE DIE DESIGN

Die design is a daily concern in the manufacturing of extruded profile s. There are very few available Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools for profile die designers and considerable time and resources must be devo ted to trial and error design procedures. This paper examines the appl icability of the flow analysis network (FAN) to the design of profile extrusion dies. The FAN method is found to provide useful design infor mation at a fraction of the computing cost required for 2.5 and 3D fin ite element methods. Experimental flow distribution obtained by extrud ing PVC compounds and polyethylene through simple profile dies are com pared to model predictions. The numerical and experimental results pro vide evidence about the significant contribution of transverse flow to the flow distribution at die exit.