Optimization of a profile extrusion die for flow balance

One of the problems encountered in the extrusion of plastic profiles is unbalanced flow at the die exit. It causes deformation of the extrudates at ambient and precludes the material transition through remaining stages of production process (calibration, cooling sections etc). In this paper, geometric parameters of a profile extrusion die are optimized using several objective function definitions by Simulated Annealing-Kriging Meta-Algorithm. Objective functions are defined based on the uniformity of velocity distribution at the die exit. For this, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are performed for N=70 die geometries. Appropriate geometric parameters (t and L) of the die are variables for the optimization problem.