Is High-Vibration Screen Media Right for Your Operation?

By Lars Bräunling, MAJOR director of product technology

There is no shortage of options for different kinds of screen media available today. From woven wire to polyurethane and perforated plate, you can equip your screen box with a variety of different types of media. High-vibration screen media has grown in popularity as a way to improve efficiency and virtually eliminate issues like blinding, pegging and clogging. Is this type of screen media right for your operation?

Here are a few things to consider.

Cost

Traditional screen media options, such as woven wire, offer a lower up-front cost. Price alone has historically made woven wire a more popular option. Many mining and aggregates operations are realizing, however, that investing in a more advanced option like high-vibration media, actually saves money in the long-term. This can be achieved through longer wear life, reduced downtime for cleaning and changeouts, increased efficiency and capacity or extended uptime. Often it is a combination of several of these effects.

Wear Life

High-vibration screen media and other specialized designs tend to offer a much longer wear life than traditional options like woven wire. Woven wire and some types of self-cleaning media have cross wires that are subject to high-wear spots, leading to a shorter wear life. Alternatively, high-vibration screen media uses highly engineered wires held together with polyurethane strips, eliminating the need for cross wires. The design extends wear life by as much as five times longer than traditional screen media, while also optimizing open area.

Blinding, Pegging & Clogging

Issues like blinding, pegging and clogging hamper an operation’s profitability potential. While some screen media is tapered to try to mitigate these problems, their design often limits the extent to which they can resolve severe issues. The independent wires in FLEX-MAT cause high frequency vibrations from hook to hook that magnify those produced by the screen box. This virtually eliminates pegging, blinding and clogging, and reduces risk of material contamination.

Better screening performance often depends on open area — a factor limited with traditional screen media. High-vibration screen media offers as much as 30% more open area than woven wire, and 50% more than polyurethane or rubber panels, enabling more material to be sized accurately in less time.

Efficiency

Screen machines are a vital contributor to a plant’s productivity when they are operating efficiently. However, poor screening creates challenging bottlenecks that hold back the entire operation and reduce production volume. Certain screen media options actually amplify the screening process to offer unparalleled efficiency.

High-vibration screen media, for example, operates at an intense frequency— up to 8,000 to 10,000 cycles per minute. That’s 13 times the vibration frequency of a standard screen box. This enhanced vibration accelerates the material stratification process, sending fines to the screen surface quicker and maximizing contact with the screen surface to improve throughput and eliminate carryover. So not only is material moving through your plant faster, you also end up with a cleaner product with less risk of material contamination.

Finding the Right Fit

When it comes to screen media selection, there is a lot to choose from, but more and more aggregate and mining operations are finding that high-vibration screen media can take their production to the next level. Reach out to your local MAJOR dealer to learn more about FLEX-MAT high-vibration screen media and where it might fit in your operation.