Extruder Drives

Modified on Saturday, 31 January 2015 04:30 PM by mpieler — Categorized as: Consultants Corner

Extruder drives
Vol. 23 #3, December 1996

There are now more choices and options available for extruder drive motors than ever before, which can cause some confusion to the user. The selection of an optimum drive is fairly straightforward, though. DC drives have a long and successful history in extrusion and are still a good choice for most applications, offering low cost and familiarity to service people. AC variable frequency drives are now becoming more popular, are available from many suppliers, are economical, and offer low motor maintenance. In either case, most extruder applications do not require the ultra precision of servo drives or expensive feedback controls. DC drives offer 0.1% regulation at a reasonable cost, and the new breed of open loop vector drives offer the required precision without a costly encoder. The best approach is to balance precision and cost reasonably to achieve 0.1% control regulation.

- Bill Kramer American Kuhne Corp.

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