Pugmill Mixers
Bonnot Pugmill Mixers Have Been Deployed for Over 100 Years
The Bonnot Company has manufactured Pugmills for over 100 years. We offer several designs and sizes depending on your need.
Extruder Design Features
1Shaft
2Bolt Through Variable Pitch Pug Knives
3High Torque Motor
4Outboard Bearing
product information
Bonnot Pugmill Mixers are continuous horizontal mixing machines used upstream of extruders to homogenise dry, semi-dry, and plastic materials before they enter the extrusion process. Unlike batch-oriented ribbon blenders or planetary mixers, the pugmill operates continuously - accepting dry powder, granules, or partially hydrated material at one end and delivering a uniformly blended, moistened, and de-lumped mass at the extruder feed point. This makes the pugmill the natural first stage in any continuous extrusion line where ingredients must be blended and conditioned before extrusion without interrupting production flow.
The pugmill's twin horizontal shafts carry intermeshing paddles that simultaneously shear and fold the material, distributing added liquids - water, binder solutions, plasticisers - evenly through the dry base within a short residence time. This combined shear-and-fold action is particularly important for ceramic pastes, where the dry-to-plastic transition must occur uniformly across the full cross-section of the material to avoid hard and soft zones in the extrudate, and for catalyst preparations, where binder distribution directly affects pellet crush strength and attrition resistance in the finished catalyst body.
Advantages at a glance
Continuous upstream conditioning eliminates the batch preparation steps and start-stop cycling that interrupt downstream extruder throughput in facilities that rely on batch mixers for pre-conditioning. The practical consequence is that the downstream extruder can operate at its rated throughput continuously rather than alternating between periods of full production and idle waiting for the next batch of conditioned material to arrive. In high-throughput installations where extruder downtime directly reduces production yield, the continuous operation of the pugmill upstream is the simplest available means of maximising the utilisation of the more expensive downstream machine.
Feed chute geometry is matched to the specific downstream extruder model, eliminating the conveyor bridges and hopper adaptors that would otherwise be required to connect a separate mixing machine to the extruder feed.
Industries and materials served
Industries and materials served
Clay and Ceramic Body Preparation
Dry ceramic powders mixed with water and plasticisers to form a consistent plastic body for extrusion is the primary application for pugmill conditioning. The uniformity of moisture distribution achieved by continuous pugmill mixing is the direct determinant of extrudate plasticity consistency - and therefore of dimensional variation at the die face - in commercial brick, pipe, and technical ceramic manufacturing.
Catalyst and Adsorbent Paste Preparation
Dry catalyst precursors, supports, and promoters are blended with binder solutions and peptising agents in the pugmill before extrusion into trilobe, quadrilobe, or cylindrical bodies. The uniform binder distribution that the pugmill achieves in a short residence time is directly responsible for the pellet-to-pellet crush strength consistency that determines whether a catalyst body survives bed loading, cyclic thermal stress, and fluidisation in the commercial reactor it is designed for.
Available in different configurations
12 Series PM Single
- Output
- 4000lbs/hour
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The Bonnot Company is pleased to offer FREE feasibility testing in our test facility. Come and take advantage of our comprehensive catalog of test equipment; different extruder designs, screw geometries, forming dies, temperature control options, mixers and material testing equipment.
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