Bengaluru, April 30, 2018

Fractional Geometry Technology (FGT), an invention of Dr Babu Padmanabhan, Founder, STEER, creator of materials platform technologies that transform and functionalise materials in the fields of plastics, pharmaceuticals, food & nutraceuticals, biomaterials and biorefining, will be on demonstration at the world’s largest plastics show NPE in Orlando, US, between May 7-11, 2018.

STEER has been focusing on improving the process efficiency of an extruder, as ensuring the homogeneous molecular structure while compounding various applications remains a challenge. Extruder elements based on FGT help overcome such challenges, especially with respect to shear-sensitive materials and pave way for new material formulation and properties development.

Dr Babu Padmanabhan, Managing Director & Chief Knowledge Officer, STEER, said, “The ability to process certain shear and temperature sensitive materials is greatly enhanced in an extruder with deeper flights. The ability to process material has benefited from improvements made in diameter ratio and specific torque. The increase in melt temperature due to the kneading elements at high speeds is solved by fractional lobed element geometry with unequal tip angles. This geometry can be alternative for standard kneading elements.”

For instance, in an eccentric trilobed kneading element, the small tip angle leads to higher wear rate. Increasing the tip-angle gives a circular shape to the element and reduces the free volume available in the extruder. The advantages with deeper screw flights are higher intake capacity (especially in starve feed), lower melt temperature due to decreased shear stress, and greater devolatisation capacity.

The FGT-based elements work as conjugate pairs while suiting the needs of twin-screw extrusion. The new element geometry provides greater flexibility in design of individual elements.