Analysis of Mixing in Corotating Twin Screw Extruders through Numerical Simulation

Mixing is a Major ingredient in many industrial processes to obtain desired and uniform material properties. Nowadays, many materials, pigments, additives, gas or reactants, are mixed to create new products combining the characteristics of different raw materials to obtain specific product properties. The quality of the mixing, i.e. the uniformity of the mixture, is a key issue that will determine the morphology and the properties of the resulting compound [1, 2]. An insight in the physics of mixing is therefore necessary in order to achieve a good quality of mixing or maintain it when scaling equipment, for example. Such information can now be obtained through the numerical simulation of the transient flow in extruder components. To improve greatly the ease of obtaining such information, a new technique introduced in a finite elements software is presented. This technique simplifies the meshing, reduces the meshes needed and eliminates complex remeshing algorithms to simulate flow in screws, pumps and mixing devices. This technique is validated versus traditional simulation methods (i.e. conforming meshes). 3-D transient numerical simulations of two twin screw extruder configurations are then presented. A further quantitative comparison of their mixing behavior is developed as statistical information (of the RTD, deformations, dispersion, etc.) can be obtained to compare both configurations in a synthetic and quantitative way.