How to cut and clean properly: Balancing wear and performance in knife-die and scraping systems

Many industrial applications rely on the use of sharp rigid materials pressed against a surface to keep it clean of solid impurities or to precisely cut an extruded material. Examples: * Doctor blade-press roll system in the paper industry * Knife-die plate system in polymer pelletizing Delicate equilibrium between the press force required for effective cleaning by scraping or cutting and the wear imparted to the components: * Too low pressing force hampers process quality * Unnecessarily high pressing force leads to higher energy consumption and increased wear No procedure exists for guiding the selection of cleaning or cutting parameters "How to find the optimum process conditions?"