Problem:
A plastics manufacturer company had difficulty achieving its production monitoring objective of measuring the temperature gradient along an extruder barrel's length.
Their original design had several flaws:
- An excessively expensive and complicated mechanical system used to move a single sensor through the gradient
- Sensor failure caused by movement-induced fatigue
- Reading inaccuracy caused by changing the sensor's gradient along its length
Solution:
Watlow Richmond vastly simplified the system while improving reliability and accuracy with a single, fixed-mounted multipoint sensor containing several sensor points. No modification was required on the extruder except removing the old, unreliable system.