IMPROVING THE EFFICIENCY OF THE CALIBRATION STAGE IN THE PRODUCTION OF EXTRUDED PROFILES

摘要

During the production of extruded profiles, the calibrator should cool down the profile both swiftly and uniformly. The main difficulty to be faced in the design of these tools arises from the fact that these two objectives are conflicting, i.e., conditions leading to a lower average temperature generally promote a lower temperature homogeneity and vice-versa. There are few ways to improve simultaneously both criteria. As shown in previous works, the most effective alternative is the division of the cooling length into several cooling units separated by annealing zones. In these zones the extrudate temperature distribution homogenizes and, as a consequence, its surface temperature increases (increasing also the thermal energy removal in the subsequent cooling unit), hence leading to improvements in both conflicting objectives. In this work, an optimization methodology (encompassing a numerical simulation code, an objective function and an optimization routine) is used to optimize the lengths of the individual cooling units and of the annealing zones with a view to improve the thermal efficiency of the calibration stage.