Conclusion

The polymer materials and compounds we develop today are increasingly complex mixtures: blends of different polymers, blends of polymers with fillers that can have very different form factors (fibers, platelets) and sizes (especially nanoparticles). Producing these blends is a crucial operation that has long been based on a good dose of empiricism, validated by a trial-and-error procedure, leading to highly sophisticated, sometimes even baroque tooling geometries.

The modeling of mixing tools has rarely preceded their design and implementation, but today it sheds light on them, enabling them to be optimized. Once we understand the two successive sequences of a mixing operation, dispersing then distributing, we realize that it is necessary to start by providing energy to break a charge into elementary particles, before imposing complex kinematics that will distribute...