Cork Extrusion Equipment completed the assembly and in-plant joint commissioning of a small medical polymer granulator unit. The equipment is designed with a capacity of 315kg/h and is suitable for the formulation research and development, small-scale trials and small-batch production of medical biodegradable materials and pharmaceutical excipients. It is compatible with two cooling processes: air-cooled strip drawing and water-cooled strip drawing, and can be flexibly switched according to the material characteristics.
The whole production line is equipped with a high-speed mixer, a co-directional twin-screw extruder, a cooling and conveying unit, and a pulling and pelletizing machine. The equipment can quickly switch cooling schemes: when using air cooling mode, the water tank is eliminated, and the entire process is dry cooled to avoid water absorption and hydrolysis of materials and water impurity pollution. No drying process is required, and it is suitable for easily hydrolyzed and sensitive medical polymers such as PLGA, PLA, and medical TPU. When switching to water cooling mode, the water tank is connected for cooling, which has higher cooling efficiency and is suitable for the processing and trial production of water-resistant medical modified polymers and general modified materials.
The main unit adopts a building block twin-screw structure. The barrel and screws can be mirror-polished and anti-corrosion treated, making disassembly, assembly and cleaning convenient and reducing the residue of high-value medical materials. The segmented, independent, precise temperature control system, combined with a vacuum devolatilization system, effectively removes monomers and low-molecular-weight volatiles, reduces the thermal degradation of polymers, and ensures the purity of the output material. The cooling and conveying section supports variable frequency speed regulation, and the wind speed and traction speed can be adjusted to ensure stable material strip forming; The particle length of the particle cutting mechanism is adjustable, and the particle size is uniform.
This model mainly serves pharmaceutical company R&D centers and university new materials laboratories, taking into account formula prototyping and small-batch trial production, and reducing the testing losses of expensive medical raw materials. The entire machine can be customized according to cleanliness requirements and adapted to medical material process verification scenarios. The equipment itself does not represent GMP certification; the workshop cleanliness conditions and a complete set of verification documents must be provided by the customer.
The iteration of new medical polymer materials is accelerating, and different materials have significantly different requirements for cooling processes. One set of equipment is compatible with both air-cooling and water-cooling processes, which can cover more R&D sample needs. Kerke continues to optimize extrusion equipment solutions and provide extrusion solutions to address the pain points of specialty polymers and medical materials. After completing factory testing, the unit will be shipped to the customer’s site for use.
