Process 11 parallel twin screw extruder

The organic material purchased to produce the organic/inorganic nanocomplex was acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) from LG Chem., Seoul, Korea. The used inorganic materials were aluminum nanoparticles, which have two particle sizes of 20 nm and 40 nm from CN vision. An extruder (Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Process 11 Parallel Twin-Screw Extruder, Waltham, MA, USA) was used to integrate Al nanoparticles into the ABS polymer. Prior to the extrusion, the material was stored in a dryer for 24 h. The 20 nm and 40 nm Al nanoparticles were dispersed in ABS at a weight ratio of 0, 3, 6, 9, and 12. The temperature and rotation speed applied to the extruder were 235 °C and 250 rpm, respectively. Resin preparation (Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Minijet Pro Piston Injection Molding System) was carried out for 5 s at 400 bar under conditions of cylinder 400 °C and mold 120 °C. Nitrogen and chromium ion beams were applied to increase the surface gloss of the ABS/Al nanocomposites. Ion beam irradiation was performed in the Korea Multipurpose Accelerator Complex (KOMAC, Seoul, Korea). The energy of the ion was 100 KeV, and the dose was 10¹³, 10¹⁴, and 10¹⁵ ions/cm².

An extruder is one of the best machines that can be used to mix two or more different materials. In this project, a Thermo Fisher Scientific Process 11 Parallel Twin-Screw Extruder with 3 mm die was used for the purpose of extrusion. Firstly, pure PP pellets were extruded with a melting temperature of ${215}^0\mathrm{C}$ , extruder rpm of 60 and melt flow pump rpm of 30. At first water cooling was given a try to be a potential option to cool the filament before winding on the spool but it was not working. Therefore instead, room temperature cooling on a conveyor belt along with a little bit of air cooling was adopted. After obtaining a spool of extruded PP filament, extrusion of composite materials was started, but the extrusion parameters were changed according to the complexity of the composite material.
For the extrusion of the composites melt temperature was kept constant, the rpm of the extruder was reduced to 40 as the mixture was quite dense and the rpm of the melt flow pump was reduced to 20 to get a uniformly mixed material. According to the literature, the surface finish of fiber-reinforced polymer composites becomes progressively dull with increasing fiber content [19 (link)]. One after one the filaments for each composite were extruded until at least one spool for each filament was obtained. The image of the spools can be seen in Fig. 1.Fig. 1

Spools of different materials.

Fig. 1