Screening equipment plays a large and important role in a processing plant. It can greatly affect your plant’s capacity, as well as the quality of your products. Screening equipment can be stationary or portable, designed for quick setup and teardown and for easy transport from site to site.
Screening equipment is commonly used to size and separate material throughout the production process. Screens used ahead of a primary crusher can remove fine material, like abrasive stone or sand, which can cause wear and tear on the crusher’s liners. They can also keep material that is already to size from entering the crusher feed, which reduces unnecessary power consumption and wear on the machine.
After the primary crushing stage, screens with multiple decks can separate material into various categories for further crushing in the secondary and tertiary stages. They can also decrease the load the crushers and other processing equipment have to handle by removing undersized and oversized material from the feed ahead of the next reduction stage.
Screens can also be used in other stages of the processing plant to produce a final, saleable product, as well as to dewater washed material to less than 14 percent moisture for easy conveying and/or stockpiling.
To size and separate material, screening equipment employs a vibrating or tumbling action that causes the feed material to divide by size. The screen media – removable, easily replaceable panels attached to the deck frame through which undersized particles pass – makes the separation by allowing smaller particles to pass through its openings. Larger particles rise to the top of the material bed due to the vibrating or tumbling action of the screen, while smaller particles filter out through the openings in the screen media, creating two or more fractions.
Each application is unique in its screening needs, though every application relies on its screen media for successful material separation. Popular screening media includes woven wire cloth, urethane, rubber or a combination of urethane and wire cloth or urethane and rubber. Each type of screen media offers producers different options when it comes to capacity and efficiency, and efficiency is key to creating a quick return on investment.
Besides sizing and separating material, screening equipment can also spilt a feed stream for separate processing, remove refuse material, reduce fines generation, and minimize crusher size. Screening equipment that is used effectively can make your processing plant more efficient.
