H. Potente et J. Flecke, ANALYSIS AND MODELING OF THE RESIDENCE TIME DISTRIBUTION IN INTERMESHING CO-ROTATING TWIN-SCREW EXTRUDERS BASED ON FINITE-ELEMENT SIMULATIONS, Journal of reinforced plastics and composites, 17(11), 1998, pp. 1047-1054
In the field of compounding and reactive extrusion the residence time
distribution, among other factors, represents an important factor for
the evaluation of the process behavior in co-rotating twin screw extru
ders. The corresponding literature presents us with a lot of publicati
ons regarding this subject. Mostly, these are empirical approaches to
describe the residence time behavior or more experimental analyses. Th
e existing description forms are often taken from the single-screw the
ory and are applied to the twin screw extruder. This paper is meant to
present a new analysis and description of the residence time behavior
of a co-rotating twin screw extruder which is based on 3-D finite ele
ment simulation for power law fluids. The residence time is thus deter
mined and evaluated by means of streamlines taken from flow simulation
. As a result the existing description formulations compared with expe
rimental data for the operating parameters needed in practice are most
ly out of the extent of validity. This is due to the high speed with a
pre-defined melt throughput and the exceptional channel geometry of t
he tightly intermeshing co-rotating twin screw extruder.