Design guidelines to balance the flow distribution in complex profile extrusion dies

Abstract

In this work a novel methodology to balance the flow distribution in complex extrusion dies is proposed. For this purpose, the profile cross section geometry is divided into simpler geometries (L and T shaped profiles), which are balanced with a surrogate model obtained by a detailed numerical study. The numerical simulations are performed considering the non-isothermal flow of Bird-Carreau inelastic fluids, and the numerical computations are performed with a solver implemented in OpenFOAM computational library. The proposed methodology is assessed with some case studies.