  This paper presents a novel spline-based meshing technique that allows for
usage of boundary-conforming meshes for unsteady flow and temperature
simulations in co-rotating twin-screw extruders. Spline-based descriptions of
arbitrary screw geometries are generated using Elliptic Grid Generation. They
are evaluated in a number of discrete points to yield a coarse classical mesh.
The use of a special control mapping allows to fine-tune properties of the
coarse mesh like orthogonality at the boundaries. The coarse mesh is used as a
'scaffolding' to generate a boundary-conforming mesh out of a fine background
mesh at run-time. Storing only a coarse mesh makes the method cheap in terms of
memory storage. Additionally, the adaptation at run-time is extremely cheap
compared to computing the flow solution. Furthermore, this method circumvents
the need for expensive re-meshing and projections of solutions making it
efficient and accurate. It is incorporated into a space-time finite element
framework. We present time-dependent test cases of non-Newtonian fluids in 2D
and 3D for complex screw designs. They demonstrate the potential of the method
also for arbitrarily complex industrial applications.

Numerical Analysis;Numerical Analysis