Low Shear Melt Barrier Screw Design Target Poly Lactic Acid, 2010 PLACE Conference

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Poly Lactic Acid (PLA) is currently one of the most available and versatile bio-based polymers used by packaging extrusion processors. It is finding wide acceptance in a number of packaging applications; sheet, film, and extrusion coating. Recently we were requested to design an optimized screw to evaluate in comparison to an existing design and an alternate new design. We were tasked to parallel the already on going development and offer our best design to meet the objectives. Both new screw designs were to be built and evaluated against the design objective for consideration to fulfill their needs in future production applications. This paper reviews the design procedure used to develop the target design and compares the results.