Immersive learning through simulation: implementing twin screw extrusion in Unity

The use of immersive environments for education is a topic that attracts growing interest, particularly within process engineering. The engines for the design of immersive environments are ill-suited for process simulation (as is the case with Unity), leading to one of three main options: either discarding the use of these tools, with the consequent discarding as well of the easy integration in many platforms and graphical and physics engines; setting an interconnection with external simulation engines, with the consequent limitations; or focusing on a simulation-free implementation altogether. In this work, we demonstrate instead the implementation of a twin-screw extrusion simulation within Unity by benefitting from the available C# optimization library alglib and using complementarity constraints, in contrast with the previous literature. We study the computational time demanded and compare the results with simulations carried out with LUDOVIC, a state of the art simulator for twin-screw extrusion. The obtained results show that this alternative provides solid performance while simplifying the deployment of the final tool for its use by students.