Extruding full rubber bales without a granulator
Walk into most rubber compounding operations today and somewhere upstream of the mixer one will find a granulator. It sits there doing the unglamorous work of reducing commercial rubber bales, those dense, tacky blocks of natural rubber, EPDM or butyl, into crumb small enough to be metered into a process line. The granulator is taken for granted; its capital cost, maintenance cycle, talc consumption and floorspace written off as simply the way things are done. It does not have to be this way.
For more than three decades, The Bonnot Company has been developing and refining a horizontal single-screw extrusion system capable of ingesting a complete rubber bale, unadulterated, uncut and without release agents, and delivering a precisely controlled, continuous output stream directly to a pelletizing die or a downstream compounding extruder. The latest generation of that system, the RF Series horizontal bale feeder, brings a redesigned pressure-sensitive screw geometry and modular crossover to a platform already proven at operations around the world. The entire bale is placed in the feeder, digested and accurately metered into the compounding extruder on a continual basis. The high cost and maintenance of a granulating system is eliminated.