Improved Wear Monitoring in Diverse Polymer Applications

Tribosonics Ltd develops novel measurement technologies for a range of industrial markets and applications and has launched and is supplying into the plastics and polymer sensing market, a measurement service called polymerSENSE(TM) to the plastics and polymer sensing market. The measurement is supplied as a service (SAAS -- Sensing-As-A-Service) to monitor injection moulding and extrusion equipment, in particular the wear of screws and barrels.

When the screw & barrel are new there is a clearance gap of the order of 0.1mm between the screw & barrel. Over time the screw wears (the screw typically wears an order of magnitude faster than the barrel) with several negative outcomes:

1\. The efficiency of the system reduces resulting in a decrease in the output from the equipment and thus lower productivity and profitability. Some polymer processors increase the rotational speed of the screw to increase the polymer throughput, but this results in an increase in energy use, impacting profitability and product quality.

2\. The quality of the resultant polymer product reduces because of the increase in shearing in the gap between the screw and the barrel. This leads to an increase in scrap from worn barrel/screw assemblies and a decrease in profit.

There are a large number of variables that affect the measurement (temperature, polymer material, frequency of transducer, size of transducer, thickness of barrel, width of flight on screw, shape of screw tip, measurement speed, etc).

This project is focused on scaling this technology and expanding its uptake within the polymer processing industry. Tribosonics will work with the Newton Gateway to reduce the time and resource needed to process the received signals into robust measurements of wear.