Design guidelines to balance the flow distribution in complex profile extrusion dies

In this work a novel methodology to balance the flow distribution in complex extrusion dies is proposed. For this purpose, the profile cross section geometry is divided into simpler geometries (L and T shaped profiles), which are balanced with a surrogate model obtained by a detailed numerical study. The numerical simulations are performed considering the non-isothermal flow of Bird-Carreau inelastic fluids, and the numerical computations are performed with a solver implemented in OpenFOAM computational library. The proposed methodology is assessed with some case studies.The authors would like to thank the financial funding by FEDER through the COMPETE 2020 Program, the National Funds through FCT under the project UID/CTM/50025/2013. A. Rajkumar acknowledges the MI-Portugal program and FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) for the funding through the scholarship (SFRH/BD/51943/2012) and L. L. Ferras acknowledges the financial support by FCT through the scholarship SFRH/ BPD/100353/2014.