The extruder is a fundamental piece of equipment in the rubber industry and is one of the key devices that affect product quality. It plays a very important role in the production processes of tires and rubber products.
1. The Development History of Rubber Extruders
1.1 The Development History of Foreign Rubber Extruders
The development of foreign rubber extruders has gone through stages such as plunger extruders, screw-type hot-feed extruders, ordinary cold-feed extruders, main-secondary thread cold-feed extruders, cold-feed vented extruders, pin-barrel cold-feed extruders, and compound extruders.
1.1.1 Plunger Extruders
The origin of extruders dates back to the 18th century when Joseph Bramah in England manufactured a manual piston-type press in 1795 for making seamless lead pipes, which is considered the world's first extruder. From then on, within the first 50 years of the 19th century, extruders were basically only used in the production of lead pipes, processing pasta and other foods, brick-making, and the ceramics industry.
In the development process of extrusion as a manufacturing method, the first clearly recorded instance was R. Brooman's patent application in 1845 for producing gutta-percha-insulated wires using an extruder. H. Bewley of Gutta-Percha Company subsequently improved this extruder and applied it in 1851 to coat the copper wire of the first submarine cable between Dover and Calais companies. Over the next 25 years, the extrusion method gradually became more significant, and electrically operated extruders quickly replaced the previous manual extruders. Early mechanically operated plunger-type extruders produced thousands of kilometers of insulated wires and cables, firmly establishing the position of the extrusion method for cable production. Early extruders used for cable production, whether manually, mechanically, or hydraulically operated, were all plunger types. In this production process, the plunger presses hot gutta-percha into a die with a copper conductor, and the gutta-percha is extruded from the die, forming an insulating layer around the copper conductor.