Smart Rubber Extrusion Line Combining Multiple Sensor Techniques for AI-Based Process Control

The extrusion process is one of the most important methods for continuous processing of rubber compounds. An extruder is used to give the rubber compound a geometrically defined shape as an extrudate. To ensure that product-specific requirements are fulfilled, the extrusion process and the resulting extrudate are currently monitored using various sensor technologies. Nevertheless, a certain amount of scrap material is produced during the extrusion process, often as a result of unstable process conditions. In this context, one solution for enhancing resource efficiency is the digitalization of the production chain. The aim of this work is to demonstrate an approach for the digitalization of an extrusion line that combines the use of innovative measuring methods for process monitoring and algorithms from the field of artificial intelligence (AI) for process control. For the validation of the individual measuring systems and the process control, various production scenarios in the extrudate production are considered. The results show that the measurement systems for process and extrudate monitoring can directly detect changes in the extrusion process and extrudate quality. Furthermore, the generated data can be used to automatically adjust the extrusion process by the developed AI-based control system.