Reactive Extrusion

NFM/Welding Engineers has been building reactive extrusion equipment for the finishing and primary manufacture of emulsion, bulk, and solution polymers since twin-screw devices were first used for such purposes. Our technology allows us handle the large volumes of solvent, water, or vapor exiting the reactor and to finish polymers commercially from emulsion, solution, or slurry in a single machine.

Our technical expertise has naturally expanded to handling reactor products and performing the reactions themselves in our extruders.

NFM’s WE Series and TEM Series extruders offer optimum conditions in carefully controlled residence time, heat transfer, and mass transfer. Our technical team can provide ready solutions to limitations in reactive extrusion process development.

The Advantages of NFM / Welding Engineers Twin-Screw Extruders

Excellent Heat Transfer Characteristics:

In reactive processing, thermal gradients at any point in the extruder can give a variable rate reaction or even promote the wrong reaction. Aside from traditional conductive cooling, for high viscosity fluids, NFM/WE can apply its direct inert fluid contact technology which avoids thermal gradients that accompany any conductive cooling mechanism.

Excellent Mass Transfer Characteristics:

Mass transfer in highly viscous fluids is often rate limiting in a reaction. NFM/WE has the experience to establish rapid intimate contact of the reactants, regardless of whether the mass transfer is between a melt and a liquid, a melt and a vapor, two melt streams, or a crumb and a liquid or vapor.

Our devolatilization technology can be readily applied to polycondensation reactions or any melt vapor mass transfer operation. Our mixing processing technology promotes contact between co-continuous insoluble phases. The continuous reorientation mechanism provides excellent distributive mixing of multiple melt phases.

Excellent Residence Time Characteristics:

Our non-intermeshing twin-screw design allows us to operate at higher throughput or longer residence time than competitive designs.