® 300 L

Vertical screw mixer
300 litres

300 litres. Hopper, barrel and screw in SS-304, driven by a 0.75 kW motor through a direct-coupled reducer. Interlocked cleaning window.

What the screw actually does

A screw and barrel are mounted vertically through the centre of the hopper. The screw draws material up from the bottom and throws it out at the top, where it forms a vortex; the dispersed material falls back down the outside of the barrel under gravity and is drawn up again.

Ten to fifteen minutes of that circulation and the batch is homogeneous. There is no tumbling drum, no ribbon and no paddle sweeping the wall — one screw, turning clockwise seen from above, doing the same thing to every kilogram in the vessel.

Why the blend decides the part

Polymer, masterbatch and regrind that are dosed separately have to be brought to a uniform mix before they reach the screw of the moulding machine or extruder. If they are not, plasticisation is uneven, and that shows up in the finished part as colour variation and inconsistent properties.

Mixing is the cheapest place in the whole process to fix that, and the easiest place to get it wrong by hand.

Mix at the machine, not in a corner of the works

Hand mixing is six separate acts of handling: move the material to a mixing area, unpack and tip it into a tub, mix it, repack it, move it to the line, and tip it into the reservoir. Every one of those is a chance to spill material, to get the ratio wrong, or to let something foreign into the batch.

Put the mixer where the machine is and three of those six disappear. It runs online with an extruder or moulding machine through the outlet port, and it takes the place of the reservoir rather than being an extra station in the works.

It also accepts material while it is mixing, so filling and blending are not two jobs done one after the other.

The drive

A 0.75 kW three-phase motor drives the screw through an ALM 63 reducer at ratio 7, coupled directly to the screw shaft. No belts to tension and nothing to slip.

Hopper, barrel and screw are SS-304. Everything outside the material path is mild steel — the cost goes where it touches the polymer.

It will not start with the window open

A proximity switch watches the cleaning window. While the window is open the motor will not start.

Cleaning a mixer means putting a hand where the screw is, and the only guard worth having is one that makes the machine incapable of running rather than one that asks the operator to be careful. There is nothing to remember, nothing to switch off first, and nothing an operator in a hurry can defeat by habit.

Built to the installation

At three hundred litres the machine is set out for the place it will stand and the line it will feed. Mounting, access and the discharge arrangement are settled when the order is placed rather than taken from a catalogue.

Tell us the material, the batch you need and the machine it feeds, and we will set it out for that duty.

What it is not for

Not recommended for powders, nor for flammable or explosive materials, nor for liquids or semi-liquids.

Specification

Mounting, access and the discharge arrangement are specified at the time of offer. Not recommended for powders, flammable, explosive, liquid or semi-liquid materials. All specifications are subject to change without notice to improve reliability, function or design.

200 L  ·  800 L  ·  1200 L  ·  2000 L

Mix-O-Well® is a registered trade mark of A. B. Plastech — 4367092, Class 7.