We just recently cleaned the screw on one of our machines and it hasn't ran right since. The recovery time, cushion, and max pressure are not holding consistently. They will stay in a certain range for a while, then suddenly shift to a faster recovery and the cushion and max pressures will shoot up. When investigating the cause, I discovered that the barrel profile was quite flat. I think 420-425 tapered up from the feed zone. We are running a 2.8 MFI HDPE. Hold times are about 12 sec and a cooling time of about 25 sec.
Is it possible that the flat profile and long cycle time has caused the material to fuse to the screw and prevent forward flow of material? What is typically done to remove this plastic from the screw?
On another note, when we pulled the screw everything measured and looked quite good, except that there was quite a bit of brown staining on the root of the screw. We had to clean this off with scotchbrite pads. Please see enclosed pic. Is this normal? Is there a better way to clean this off? Do I need to use some sort of polishing compound on this?