Know This Type Of Rubber Extruder Machine

Cold Feed Extruders are designed and manufactured with specially designed screws best suited for cold feeding of rubber. You can discuss with your manufacturer and avail various options of screws for a wide range of compound and extrusion applications.

While manufacturers offer L/D ratio up to 24:1, the most preferred by end-users is generally in the range 12:1 to 18:1.

Pin Type CFE
Pin Type CFE Image from Web

For feeding the cold rubber, it is recommended that you use a feeding conveyor with metal detector to remove metal particles. This avoids damage to the screw or barrel. In some plants, I find the sensitivity of the metal detector calibrated to a low value that it virtually renders the detector useless.

Every CFE comes with a Temperature Controller Unit (TCU) that controls the barrel temperature so that the shape and size of the extruded products are uniform.

Variants in cold feed extruders along with their uses are

Plain Barrel Type Cold Feed Extruder – These CFE’s as the name suggests have a plan barrel and used in manufacturing of hoses, blanks, fluorocarbon rubber, butyl rubber, etc.
Pin Barrel Type Cold Feed Extruder – These CFE’s have around 80-100 pins protruding out of the barrel towards the screw center. These pins enhance the mixing and dispersion of your rubber as it is kneaded between the barrel and screw. And the result is processed rubber with outstanding homogeneity and extrudate quality. This flexibility in Pin Type Cold Feed Extruders endears to all making it a universal extruder for many rubber compound formulations involving varied applications. Hard rubber compounds also can be processed because of high extruder torque.
Vent Type Cold Feed Extruder – Vent type or vacuum type extruders were developed for production of non-porous profiles and hoses. These CFE’s have a custom-built screw, and a degassing barrel with a vacuum pump attached to vent bubbles out of extruded compounds.
Triplex Extruder
Nakata Make Triplex Extruder

Co-extrusion: Customer-specific customization and usage complexity demands led to the introduction of co-extrusion for manufacturing of various profiles. And so you today have Simplex, Multiplex (Duplex, Triplex, Quadruplex, and Quintuplex) and Roller Head technology. Multiplex lines of piggy-back type of 2,3,4, and 5 layers have a compact construction.

Roller-Head-Extruder
Berstoff Make Roller Head Extruder

Roller Head Technology involves a combination of extruder with preform head and two-roll calender. They offer twin advantages of – high uniformity of the material thickness over the entire sheet width with absence of air traps even at higher thicknesses (~ 20mm thick as against conventional calender lines that give max 3mm thick sheets with or without air traps) and excellent homogeneity of the material produced.

Both these characteristics are important for high-quality rubber products such as tire components, V-belts, conveyor belts, tank linings, cover sheets, blank sheets and roofing sheets, etc. For even thickness across the entire sheet width of the roller head, there are three options that can be used alone or in combination with one another – roll crowning, roll crossing or roll bending, that will compensate for the elastic deflection of rolls. (I will cover more on these in an another post)

In today’s world you will see that usages of these technologies are overlapped. For example, in tire industry, you can notice that
Tread & Sidewall are extruded using Simplex, Duplex, Triplex, Quadruplex Lines
Apex are extruded using through Simple & Duplex
Inner Liner are extruded using Simple, Duplex & Roller Head Technology

Rubber extrusion is in itself a vast subject, however if you know the above terms and types of rubber extruders, you have made a good beginning.

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