Enhancing dynamic mixing and heat transfer of polymer by inducing ductile flow applying field synergy principle

Abstract

An innovative and effective approach for screw design and optimization has been proposed, derived from multi-field synergy to address a growing challenge affected by the inadequate mixing and thermal management in plasticizing process of extrusion or injection. Dimensionless field synergy equations for incompressible non-Newtonian viscous polymers were established, and subsequently, two new types of screw structures—field synergy torsion element (FST) and field synergy elongation element (FSE)—were designed, fabricated, and validated through both simulation and experiment. Spiral and elongational flows were established in the newly designed screws owing to their unique structures of torsion channel and convergent channel, promoting the shear and stretch ductile deformations of polymer melt, documented to be a meaningful progress on flow patterns generated by conventional screw. A comparative investigation in this work of the newly designed screw with a conventional one showed that the newly proposed screws equipped with FSTs or FSEs performed better mixing and improved heat transfer and thermal uniformity. Multi-field synergy analysis revealed that the spiral and elongational flow enhanced the radial convection, improved the dependence of velocity and velocity gradient fields to facilitate melt stretching deformation as well as the dependence of velocity and temperature gradient fields to achieve heat transfer enhancement.