Energy Consumption Analysis for a Single Screw Extruder - Intelligent Computing for Sustainable Energy and Environment - page 533

Energy Consumption Analysis for a Single Screw
Extruder

Jing Deng 1 ,KangLi 2 , Eileen Harkin-Jones 1 , Mark Price 1 ,
Nayeem Karnachi 1 , and Minrui Fei 3

1 School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, BT9 5AH, UK
2 School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, BT9 5AH, UK
3 School of Mechatronic Engineering and Automation,
Shanghai University, Shanghai 200072, China

Abstract. Polymer extrusion is regarded as an energy intensive production pro-
cess, the real-time monitoring of both thermal energy and motor drive energy
consumption becomes necessary for the development of energy efficient manage-
ment 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 pro-
cess 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 analy-
sis 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.

1 Introduction

Due to the low cost, super mechanical characteristics and ease of processing, polymers
are becoming increasingly prevalent as basic materials in many industrial applications.
According to the British Plastics Federation (BPF), the UK polymer industry is made
up of 7,400 companies which produced around 2.5 million tonnes of plastics in 2011
with a turnover of £ 19 billion [1]. This number is still increasing as more traditional
materials, such as wood, concrete and metal, are substituted by polymer.
The lightweight of plastics can help to reduce energy consumption in transportation
and its related area. For instance, the Airbus A380 is 20% carbon fibre reinforced and
burns 12% less fuel per seat, and for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the lighter but strong
fuselage gives a 30% reduction in maintenance cost and 20% in fuel [1]. The processing
of plastics, however, is energy intensive. In UK, the electricity bill for this purpose