A bench top extruder developed at Bradford University is able to collect data about its own operation and to determine a wide range of characteristics of the material with which it is working.

Most of the intelligence is provided via a digital TorqSense torque sensor, which uniquely collects data via a radio signal rather than being hard wired to the extruder, and passes it onto a computer for analysis.

The extruder, developed under a commercial contract by Dr Raj Patel, supervised by Professor Hadj Benkreira, is specifically for use with fine chemicals, as used in industries such as electronics, plastics, nanotechnology and pharmaceuticals. One element of the design brief was that it should be easy to scale up to create full sized production extruders.

Dr Patel explains: "This requirement immediately made me think of using a TorqSense. Comprehensive mapping of torque requirement and how it varies at different speed and with different materials allows us to quickly define the power train that will be required on production-scale machines."