Energy consumption analysis for a single screw extruder

Polymer extrusion is regarded as an energy intensive production process, the real-time monitoring of both thermal energy and motor drive energy consumption becomes necessary for the development of energy efficient management system. The use of power meter is a simple and easy way to achieve this, however the cost sometimes can be high. Mathematical models based on the process settings provide an affordable alternative, but the resultant models cannot be easily extended to other extruders with different geometry. In this paper, simple and accurate energy real-time monitoring methods are developed for the analysis of energy consumption of the thermal heating and motor drive respectively. This is achieved by looking inside the controller, and use the control variables to calculate the power consumption. The developed methods are then adopted to study the effects of operating settings on the energy efficiency. These include the barrel heating temperature, water cooling temperature, and screw speed. The experimental results on Killion KTS-100 extruder show that the barrel heating temperature has a negative effect on energy efficiency, while the water cooling setting affects the energy efficiency positively but insignificantly. Undoubtedly, screw speed has the most significant effect on energy efficiency.