Numerical Simulation of Mixing Performance of Intermeshing Co-Rotating Tri-Screw and Twin-Screw Extruders

Parallel arranged tri-screw extruder (PATSE) is a new machine of polymer processing and first manufactured in recent years in China. Compared with the traditional twin-screw extruder, PATSE adds a screw, and added an intermeshing region. It is well known that material going though intermeshing region will acquire higher shear rate and stretching rate, which is beneficial to mixing processing. In order to know the mixing performance in cross-section for PATSE, polymer melt flow field simulation and mixing simulation were conducted on PATSE with 2D model and a Carreau flow model to evaluate velocity profiles, particle trajectories, max shear rate, max stretching rate, dispersive mixing, distributive mixing, segregation scale, length of stretch, mixing efficiency with the commercial CFD package Polyflow and compared with those of twin screw extruder (TSE). The results show that PATSE has better mixing performance than TSE.