Silicone, a material that is attracting attentions due to its versatilities in the products in materials industry, is widely used throughout the industry due to its physical and chemical properties. Among them, the liquid silicone rubber composed of two-component type has lower manufacturing cost due to the development of production techniques and increased usages and is widely used in electricity, electronics, machinery, automobiles, aerospace and architectural civil engineering, cosmetics used in households, and food-related products, etc. Utilization is expanding significantly.
Control of the mixing ratio is the most important factor in determining the quality of the final product because the physical and chemical properties of the final product become uniform as the mixing ratio of the main material (A) and the subsidiary material (B) becomes uniform while using the two-component liquid silicone rubber. Existing technologies have had many quality problems with respect to the structures and the control systems that cannot accurately and uniformly control the mixing ratio of two-component liquid silicone with various viscosities.
In this paper, in order to solve these problems of the existing technology, the control system with pressure and position sensors in addition to a digital flow meter attached to the liquid-silicone feeding system operated by a piston pumping feeding or a screw rotation feeding is proposed.
The new control system was designed to improve the existing piston pumping feeding system, and its validation was demonstrated through empirical testings. In addition, the same control system was applied to the mixing system with the screw rotation feeding method using a servo motor to solve the unstable feeding caused by the pumping structure of the piston pumping feeding system.
To verify the reliability of the proposed system, inputs, etc. were comparatively analyzed, and changes in physical and chemical properties of the mixed materials were confirmed by analyzing characteristics and performing aging tests by utilizing test specimens. It was proved that the mixing ratio is controlled within a certain deviation ratio without unstable feeding occurred in the screw rotation feeding system