The much-touted Fourth Industrial Revolution is ushering in large scale sensing, data acquisition and analysis capabilities among interconnected devices on the factory floor. Two rubber extrusion line applications that can benefit from this increased capability are (1) size and shape control of individual extrudate dimensions and (2) systematic real-time troubleshooting.
Generally, control of extrusion lines is limited to size control (controlling linear weight by adjusting screw speeds relative to line speed). In this paper, seven methods of controlling individual dimensions or classes of dimensions relative to each other (shape control) are enumerated and documented.