INDUSTRIAL SCREENING

• Industrial sizing is extensively used for size separations from 300 mm

down to around 40 ηm, although the efficiency decreases rapidly with
fineness.
• Dry screening is generally limited to material above about 5 mm in
size, while wet screening down to around 250ηm is common.
• Although there are screen types that are capable of efficient size
separations down to 40 ηm, sizing below 250 ηm is also undertaken
by classification.
• Selection between screening and classification is influenced by the
fact that finer separations demand large areas of screening surface and
therefore can be expensive compared with classification for high-
throughput applications.
 PURPOSE OF SCREENING
• Sizing or Classifying, to separate particles by size, usually to provide a
downstream unit process with the particle size range suited to that unit
operation;
• Scalping, to remove the coarsest size fractions in the feed material,
usually so that they can be crushed or removed from the process;
• Grading, to prepare a number of products within specified size ranges.
This is important in quarrying and iron ore, where the final product
size is an important part of the specification;
• Media recovery, for washing magnetic media from ore in dense
medium circuits;
• Dewatering, to drain free moisture from a wet sand slurry;
• Desliming or de-dusting, to remove fine material, generally below 0.5
mm from a wet or dry feed
• Trash removal, usually to remove wood fibres from a fine slurry
stream.
 By screening operation in mineral processing

• Capacities and recovery of the crushers are

increased.
• Particle size is controlled in closed crushing circuits
• Materials of different size fractions are prepared
• Proper sized material are produced for concentration
methods.
 SCREEN TYPES
According to structure of screen surface According to working principles
• Bolt-in Screening Surface • Stationary Screens
• Woven Wire Screens Stationary Grizzly
• Parallel Steel Bars Stationary Curved Screen
• Modular Screen Surfaces

• Moving Screens
Revolving Screen
Shaking Screen
Vibrating Screen
• Stationary Grizzly
• Static grizzlies are used before primary crushers. It is made from parellel bars. It
works dry. Screening range is 300-20mm. Capacities can be 1000 t/h. They are
installed at a slope of 35-50 ~ to assist material flow.
• Static grizzlies are less efficient than their vibrating counterparts and are usually
used in scalping applications when the proportion of oversize material in the feed is
small.
•
 Stationary Inclined Screen
• Screening surface is inclined. They are recently used in closed circuit
grinding operations . Due to inclined surface, only particles smaller
than half of screen aperture size can pass the screen. Minimum size
limit of screening is 50 µm. Capacities are <180 m3/h.

Feeding Box

Frame

Screen Surface
 Trommel (Revolving) Screen
• One of the oldest screening devices is the trommel or revolving
screen, which is a cylindrical screen typically rotating at between
35 and 45% critical speed. Trommels are installed on a small
angle to the horizontal or use a series of internal baffles to
transport material along the cylinder. Trommels can be made to
deliver several sized products by using trommel screens in series
from finest to coarsest such as the one shown.
• Trommels can handle material from 55 mm down to 6 mm, and
even smaller sizes can be handled under wet screening
conditions. Although trommels are cheaper, vibrationfree, and
mechanically robust; they typically have lower capacities than
vibrating screens since only part of the screen surface is in use at
any one time, and they can be more prone to blinding.
• Trommels remain widely used in some screening duties
including aggregate screening plants.
• Shaking Screen
• Size range of screening is over 12 mm. It is widely used in coal
beneficiation operetions. Shaking frequencies are betwen 60-800 per
minute. Shaking throws can change from 2 to 22.5 cm. Screen is
constructed horizontaly or slight inclined.
• Vibrating screens
• Vibrating screens are the most important, widely used and versatile screening
machines for mineral processing applications. Vibrating screens have a rectangular
screening surface with feed and oversize discharge at opposite ends. They perform
sizeseparations from 300 mm in size down to 45 ηm and they are used in a variety
of sizing, grading, scalping, dewatering, wet screening, and washing applications.
Vibrating screens of most types can be manufactured with more than one screening
deck. On multiple-deck systems, the feed is introduced to the top coarse screen; the
undersize falling through to the lower screen decks, thus producing a range of sized
fractions from a single screen.
• Vibrating Grizzly Screens Very coarse material is usually screened on an inclined
screen called a grizzly screen. Grizzlies are characterised by parallel steel bars or
rails set at a fixed distance apart and installed in line with the flow of ore. The gap
between grizzly bars is usually greater than 50 mm and can be as large as 300 mm,
with feed top size as large as 1 m.
• Vibrating Inclined Screens Inclined or circular motion screens are widely used as
sizing screens. A vertical circular or elliptical vibration is induced mechanically.
• Banana screens or Multi-slope Screens have become widely used in high-tonnage
sizing applications where both efficiency and capacity are important. Banana
screens typically have a variable slope of around 40-30 ° at the feed end of the
screen, reducing to around 0-15 ° in increments of 3.5-5 °
Circular
Linear
Inclined
Inclined

Horizontal Horizontal

Linear
Elliptical
• Vibrating Grizzly

Vibrating Inclined Screen

BANANA SCREEN
• Screening surfaces
• The selection of screening surface for a particular duty will depend on the aperture required
and the nature of the work. The selection of the size and shape of the apertures, the proportion
of open area, the material properties of the screening surface, and flexibility of the screen
surface can be critical to the performance of a screening machine. Screening surfaces are
usually manufactured from steel, rubber, or polyurethane.
• Parallel Bar Surfaces are made from steel bars and used in grizzlies.
• Bolt-in screening surfaces: Screening surfaces for screening duties with particles larger than
around 50 mm frequently consist of large sheets of punched, laser-cut, or plasma-cut steel
plate, often sandwiched with a polyurethane or rubber wear surface to maximise wear life.
These sheets are rigid and are bolted to the screen.
• Tensioned screening surface: Tensioned screens are available in various wire weaves as well
as polyurethane and rubber mats. As being tensioned screen surface, traditional woven-wire
cloth, usually constructed from steel or stainless steel, remains popular. Wire cloths are the
cheapest screening surfaces, have a high open area, and are comparatively light. The high
open area generally allows a screen to be smaller than a screen with modular panels for the
same capacity duty. In relatively light screening duties, therefore, wire-tensioned screens are
often preferred. Increasing the wire thickness increases their strength, but decreases open
areaand hence capacity. Various types of square and rectangular weaves are available.
Rectangular screen apertures have a greater open area than square-mesh screens of the same
wire diameter. The wire diameter chosen depends on the nature of the work and the capacity
required. Fine screens can have the same or greater open areas than coarse screens, but the
wires used must be thinner and hence more fragile.
• Modular screening surfaces are the most popular screening surfaces in harsh screening duties
are polyurethane and rubber screen decks usually assembled in modules or panels that are
fixed onto a sub-frame. Both materials offer exceptional resistance to abrasion. Rubber also
has excellent impact resistance; therefore rubber is often used in applications where top size
can be greater than around 2" (50 mm). Polyurethane is generally preferred in wet screening
applications.
Screen with Parallel Bars are used in screening of coarse materials. Bolt in surface screens with
circular, square and rectangular aperture are used in medium sized materials. Woven wire
screens with square and rectangular openings are used in screening of fine materials.
• EFFICIENCY OF SCREENING
•
• The efficiency of screening is determined by the degree of perfection
of separation of the material into size fractions above or below the
aperture size. The most common screen performance criteria are those
which define an efficiency based on the recovery of material at a
given size, or on the mass of misplaced material in each product. This
immediately leads to a range of possibilities, such as undersize in the
overscreen product, oversize in the through-screen product, or a
combination of the two.
• An efficiency equation can be calculated from a mass balance across a
screen as follows: Consider a screen the feed to which is F t /[Link]
products are generated. A coarse product of C t/ h overflows from the
screen, and a fine product of U t /h passes through the screen. Let f be
the fraction of material above the screen aperture in the feed; c be the
fraction of material above the screen aperture in the overflow; and u
be the fraction of material above screen aperture in the underflow, f, c,
and u can be determined by sieving a representative sample of each of
the fractions on a laboratory screen of the same aperture size as the
industrial screen and assuming this to be 100% efficient.
 A combined effectiveness, or overall efficiency, E, is then
obtained by multiplying the two equations together: (8.3)

A simplification of Equation 8.3 can be obtained by assuming that it is, in

fact, zero (i.e., u = 0), in which case the formula for fines recovery and that
for the overall efficiency both reduce to:
• An efficiency or partition curve for a screen is drawn by plotting the partition
coefficient, defined as the percentage of the feed reporting to the oversize product,
against the geometric mean size on a logarithmic scale. The separation size, or cut
point, is obtained at 50% probability, i.e. the size at which a particle has equal
chance of reporting to the undersize or oversize product. The cut point is always less
than the size of the largest apertures. The efficiency of separation is assessed from
the steepness of the curve .
FACTORS EFFECTING PERFORMANCE OF SCREENING
• Feed rate
• In industrial screening practice, economics dictate that relatively high feed rates and
short particle dwell times on the screen should be used. At these high feed rates, a
thick bed of material is presented to the screen, and fines must travel to the bottom
of the particle bed before they have an opportunity to pass through the screen
surface. The net effect is reduced efficiency. High capacity and high efficiency are
often opposing requirements for any given separation, and a compromise is
necessary to achieve the optimum result.
• Screen angle
• If a particle approaches the aperture at a shallow angle, it will "see" a narrower effective
aperture dimension and nearmesh particles are less likely to pass. The slope of the screening
surface affects the angle at which particles are presented to the screen apertures. Some
screens utilise this effect to achieve separations significantly finer than the screen aperture.
For example, sieve bends cut at approximately half the aperture size. Where screening
efficiency is important, horizontal screens are selected. The screen angle also affects the
speed at which particles are conveyed along the screen, and therefore the dwell time on the
screen and the number of opportunities particles have of passing the screen surface.
•
• Particle shape
• Most granular materials processed on screens are non-spherical. While spherical particles
pass with equal probability in any orientation, irregular-shaped near-mesh particles must
Orient themselves in an attitude that permits them to pass. Elongated and slabby particles
will present a small cross-section for passage in some orientations and a large cross-section
in others. The extreme particle shapes therefore have a low screening efficiency. Mica, for
instance, screens poorly on square aperture screens, its flat, platelike crystals tending to
"ride" over the screen apertures.
•
• Open area
• The chance of passing through the aperture is proportional to the percentage of open area
in the screen material, which is defined as the ratio of the net area of the apertures to the
whole area of the screening surface. The smaller the area occupied by the screen deck
construction material, the greater the chance of a particle reaching an aperture. Open area
generally decreases with the fineness of the screen aperture. In order to increase the open
area of a fine screen, very thin and fragile wires or deck construction must be used. This
fragility and the low throughput capacity are the main reasons for classifiers replacing
screens at fine aperture sizes.
• Vibration
• Screens are vibrated in order to throw particles off the screening surface so that they can
again be presented to the screen, and to convey the particles along the screen. The fight
type of vibration also induces stratification of the feed material, which allows the fines to
work through the layer of particles to the screen surface while causing larger particles to rise
to the top. Stratification tends to increase the rate of passage in the middle section of the
screen. The vibration must be sufficient to prevent pegging and blinding. However, excessive
vibration intensity will cause particles to bounce from the screen deck and be thrown so far
from the surface that there are very few effective presentations to the screen surface.
Higher vibration rates can, in general, be used with higher feed rates, as the deeper bed of
material has a "cushioning" effect which inhibits particle bounce. Vibration Generally,
screening at larger apertures is performed using larger amplitudes and lower frequencies;
whereas for fine apertures, small amplitudes and high frequencies are preferred.

• Moisture
• The amount of surface moisture present in the feed has a marked effect on screening
efficiency, as does the presence of clays and other sticky materials. Damp feeds screen very
poorly as they tend to agglomerate and "blind" the screen apertures. As a rule of thumb,
screening at less than around 5 mm aperture size must be performed on perfectly dry or wet
material, unless special measures are taken to prevent blinding. Wet screening allows finer
sizes to be processed efficiently down to 250ηm and finer. Adherent fines are washed off
large particles, and the screen is cleaned by the flow of pulp and additional water sprays.
•
• Amount of particles with critical size
• Particle having near size with aperture of screen
• cause blinding of the aperture, thus, reducing the capacity and recoverys.
• Critical Size=0,75-1,5x Screen Aperture