Correlation of the heater’s duty cycle and specific energy consumption, and reduction in energy consumption in the pultrusion process

Abstract Efforts have been made to improve the line speed and consequently the economy of the pultrusion in last few years, but most of the reported work focuses on the kinematics of the curing reaction and different resin systems. Pultrusion is a fast cure process where heat is supplied through heaters to start and complete the curing process inside the die to get quality product at relatively high speeds. This work has extended the previous studies and quantifies for the first time the duty cycle of the heaters of a typical process to establish a relationship between the duty cycle and the specific energy consumption (SEC) of the process. It is shown experimentally and analytically that preheating the precursor would result in higher line speeds and shorter duty cycle, thus contributing to the reduction in SEC by up to 30%.