Your Mini-Guide To Selecting The Best Vibratory Screen Separators For Your Factory

Industrial vibratory screen separators are a great way to sort product flows into multiple fractions quickly, thoroughly, and without particle sizing errors or cross-contamination based on particle sizes. However, it's crucial to know how to best specify a screen separator to ensure the unit meets production performance. Here's our mini-guide.

What Is a Vibratory Screen Separator?

A linear vibratory screen separator is either a twin out-of-balance or an electromechanical drive machine that uses combinations of mesh aperture / perforation plate hole sizes to classify mainly dry and free flowing products.

Circular separators use rapid-vibration (designed specifically in vertical and horizontal movement) to process incoming solid or liquid particulate streams using either linear or circular motion. As with mechanised/manual sieves and filters, high-speed vibration allows a constant vibratory motion to separate particulates of varying sizes and helps catch / trap or separate contaminants or debris.

With the correct vibration settings and a suitable aperture mesh, vibratory separators can process granular foodstuffs, organics, minerals, dry powders, and liquid-solid mixes. Separators can sieve, separate, classify or grade by size and even control its flow on a continuous basis.

Considerations For Selecting The Right Machinery

1) Quality of the mesh: The quality of the mesh is important, especially its tension using fine mesh and ultrasonics to produce a reliable screening process. Wire mesh or perforated plates can both be used where for certain product applications perforated plates can be more durable with heavier material.

2) Correct aperture: Whether you use mesh or perforated plates, the aperture size is crucial to correctly separate your product into the required fractions and divisions. Small aperture meshes (20 to 500 µm) are susceptible to blinding and may require ultrasonic actuation to de-blind the screen.

3) Feed rate – It is important to ensure the product feed rate and delivery to the screen area is correctly setup. Feed rate can vary by product and normally is calculated for materials in a ‘dry and free-flowing’ state. Several factors may affect flow including moisture content, environmental moisture, temperature, fat content and agglomeration.

4) Temperature of materials and moisture: All materials have an innate level of viscosity, so temperature and environmental moisture levels should be closely controlled to avoid issues such as blockages and sticking (which may impact screening accuracy and production volume). The screening/sieving process can also be affected by your screening requirements – including the number of fractions needed, particle size, feed rate and flow, vibration settings etc).

5) Bulk density and material volume: The bulk density is important to define and is used to determine the size of the separator screen required i.e. diameter and screen area for linear machines. Low bulk density products typically require a larger unit to achieve the same kilograms per hour throughput as for a higher bulk density material. Applications with a high material volume also generally require a larger screen area to sustain the same throughput rate.

6) Dust proofing and safety considerations: For product safety reasons, some vibratory screens may require dust proofing, utilising dustproof covers to keep airborne particulates away from the product. Gough units can be supplied for use in both safe areas and certain ATEX rated zones which are defined by the customer. However, usually our equipment is exempt from internal ATEX requirements due to its design and operation having no moving parts.

7) Product-specific considerations: A vibratory screen separator should be tailored to the needs of your application and the product properties – as well as for integration with other equipment in your production line. Some equipment may also require regulatory approval for use with certain products, such as FDA approval for the foods industry.

Ensuring Product Quality

• A trusted supplier – In our case, we are a supplier of high specification machinery, designed, manufactured and commissioned with superb aftercare. Our equipment has been supplied to industries over many years with patents e.g. such as a Vibrecon, Vibraflo and Swinglink bucket elevators.
• Industrial-grade stainless steel construction - durable, hygienic, and damage resistant.
• Proven vibration – designed and operational performance delivered to all customers over many decades.

Next Steps

At Gough Engineering, we design and supply a wide choice of high-quality vibratory separators and screeners for dry product processing applications.

Equipped with a unique air bellows system (as opposed to springs), our vibratory separators allow better motion control of screens and improved performance in sieving and separation. On linear screens we can also incline the surface to enable better flow for certain sticky materials. Please get in touch with one of our engineers to find out more – each machine comes with a tailored design to easily integrate into your existing production systems.