The team at iBulk came across an interesting challenge recently when it was approached by a major mineral and sand miner to screen titanium sand at 300µm.
iBulk prides itself on answering every request with the development of interesting and innovative solutions that are designed to meet the exact requirements of a client’s specifications, the company claims.
“At face value that seemed a reasonable and run of the mill request that in most cases would be handled more than adequately by one of our standard screeners,” said iBulk managing director, Tony Webber.
“But as we worked through the project specifications further with this particular client, it became more obvious that there were some unique requirements that we’d needed to consider to ensure their expectations were completely fulfilled.”
The research and development team at iBulk were required to contend with two major issues that separated this project from a standard screening installation, and these were dust extraction and space, iBulk claims.
Dust encapsulation was particularly important to reduce the chance of product contamination, while the iBulk engineers also had to contend with a site where limited space was available in which to install the machines, the company said.
“These two individual, but equally important factors changed the ball game completely. And combined they really set our design team with an interesting challenge,” said Webber.
The solution was to start with Rotex 521 Gyratory Screener as the basis before making a large number of design modifications that would be incorporated into the build. The Rotex Screener is a separator of dry bulk solids when presented with very fine particles.
“We redesigned the screen frames and the top cover of the machine so as to accommodate our client‘s requirements. At iBulk® we’re not just proprietary equipment providers, our design engineers are able to assess the customer’s needs and provide a suitable solution,” Webber said.
A key feature of the Rotex 521 Gyratory Screener is a ball cleaning system that iBulk claims is “is unsurpassed when working with products that have the tendency to blind screen surfaces.”
“It was paramount to keep that feature intact no matter what other modifications needed to be made to the machine,” said Webber.
“The ball cleaning systems sets this machine head-and-shoulders above the competition and our engineers didn’t baulk at the challenge, delivering a final design that maintained this feature by introducing new screen fixing methods to maintain a fully isolated system so as to ensure no contamination of the fines in the underflow could occur.
“When we measure screening efficiency we are determined that our machines offer efficiencies of greater than 95 per cent. This is what sets iBulk apart from other types of screening machine equipment providers.”