A New Generation of Extruders With an Active Grooved Feed Section

Abstract

Only a few original designs of the active grooved feed section are known, used in laboratory prototype extruders, which were used to test their characteristics. The active grooved feed section, as opposed to the passive one, is characterized by the possibility of changing the constructional features during the extrusion process, without the need to stop the process. These features are: the number of grooves, the angle of inclination of the grooves, the depth of the grooves, the direction of the grooves' rotation, the angle of rotation, the shape of the grooves' cross-section. The paper describes the latest design solution of the active grooved feed section of a single screw extruder developed within the international research project NEWEX, implemented in the EU Framework Programmer Horizon 2020.