Experience in PE-Xa processing incorporated into battenfeld-cincinnati’s most powerful line

At an event in Vienna, Austria recently, battenfeld-cincinnati demonstrated its “most powerful” line for the processing of cross-linked polyethylene for pipe production.

The company showcased its extrusion line to 40 customers from Europe and the Near and Middle East. With an output of up to 150 kg/h, it reaches substantially higher throughput rates than conventional lines or RAM extruders and offers the advantage of an extremely short, low-maintenance cross-linking station.

In contrast to other production and cross-linking processes, battenfeld-cincinnati says the inline process demonstrated during the event enables the production of peroxide cross-linked pipes with high cross-linking rates at extremely low cost.

“PE-Xa pipe extrusion is not an easy task, due to the special demands of the material – so we are all the more pleased that we were able to answer our customers’ questions during the presentations and afterwards directly next to the line,” said Dietmar Stani, Product Manager at battenfeld-cincinnati Austria.

“Through intensive testing, we have gathered experience with PE-Xa, which we have subsequently incorporated in the creation of our specialised extruder and pipe die for PE-Xa processing. As a result, we can offer our customers an optimal system for processing this material.”

Core components for cross-linked PE pipe production, beside the optimal material blend and the cross-linking unit, are the twin-screw extruder and the pipe head. With its screw geometry specially designed for this application, battenfeld-cincinnati says its counter-rotating parallel twinEX 93-28 PE-Xa extruder ensures homogeneous melt processing at low melt temperatures. Thermal stress and flow stagnation are excluded, and a favourable dwell time profile is achieved. The same principles apply to the RK32PEX pipe head used in the line, the company explained. The pipe head has been specially adapted to the task in terms of pipe head volume and streamlined flow channels, in order to prevent material deposits and cross-linking inside the die.

Via an elbow adapter, the pipes pass directly into the infrared oven. Eight IR heating elements installed inside the vertical oven ensure a high cross-linking rate at line speeds of up to 30 m/min. In combination with the matching downstream equipment for pipe calibration, cooling, haul-off and cutting, an “excellent quality standard for the pipe” is ensured, says battenfeld-cincinnati, which is crucial for these specific applications.