What Are Twin Screw Pumps?

In manufacturing, among several other fields, pumps are often used in the creation and maintenance of various products and services--everything from irrigation to making candy. Rotary positive displacement pumps are essential in all sorts of manufacturing for their brilliant design: by creating an internal vacuum for pumping fluid, it erases the need to take air out of the line manually and is cleaner, safer, and more efficient. Screw pumps in particular have been around since Archimedes’ time, and work on the simple principle of letting fluid be isolated by and conveyed through the ridges of a screw.

The contemporary mechanical pump, however, has evolved to meet a plethora of needs since its inception. Not only are pumping devices still used in farming and irrigation as they were in ancient Greece, they're critically important for working water and air filtration; pumping oil, water, and natural gas; and in the fields of medicine and biology, mechanical pumps are often relied on for the manufacture of medication as well as the development of prosthetic replacements for parts of the body that pump and circulate fluid, such as the arteries or penis.

Twin screw pumps are a kind of rotary positive displacement pump designed to deal with a plethora of different kinds of fluid while making little to no contact with the internal surface of the machinery. Most industrial twin screw pumps can handle non-homogenous fluid, including viscous, caustic, and even acidic substances.

The design of the twin screw pump is beautifully simple--two screws of identical size and shape operate next to each other, and their working in tandem moves fluid through the line. This design is often best used for substances with a high volume of gaseous material and temperamental inlets. In order to seal the pump, four mechanically-operated seals are used on the shaft: two for each individual screw.

While it can be easy to lump all twin screw pumps together based on the idea of its workings alone, there are plenty of other factors to consider: the number of axes on the pump, the shape and size of the screws used, what they’re made out of, what materials they’re optimized for pumping or filtering, etc. For example, some may be best used for filtering water in an aquarium, while others may be made for sanitizing large bodies of water. Since there's a wide-reaching number of applications for this one machine, it can be daunting to find what best suits the needs of a particular business. Fortunately, most pump manufacturers will detail the specifications of their products as well as how they're meant to be used.

The twin screw pump is not just the natural evolution of a simple machine--it is a powerhouse that helps keep civilization running comfortably from behind the scenes. If it weren't for this machinery, a lot of people would be out of clean air, water, and medicine. Food couldn't be manufactured and distributed; energy and fuelling needs couldn't be met adequately; and a lot of homes would be out of electricity.