If you are familiar with ultrasonic sieving and have concerns over contamination of your product then this blog will grab your attention. Recently, one of our customers approached us with a difficult request. They needed to have an ultrasonic screener that consisted of 100% stainless steel contact parts. A traditional screener consisting of all stainless steel contact parts did not produce the yield and throughput needed for their process and inquired about providing a screener with ultrasonics. This request included the screen frame and the sieving surface (wire mesh) had to be free of any adhesives, etc.
Since our standard ultrasonic frames are machined aluminum this posed a challenge for us. Although we have tried making stainless steel screen frames in the past, the density of the stainless gave us some issues in transmitting out ultrasonics through the frame and across the screen surface. The second requirement of the screen surface is clear of any transducers which was an easy one for us since we currently do not attach our Read More…
My mom just had her 80th birthday the other day. To celebrate the milestone, one of my sisters and her husband are taking my mom on an Alaskan cruise, I’m sure it will be a great adventure. A few years back I had the opportunity to visit Alaska as part of a Cleveland Vibrator Company project, I was there to provide start up assistance and review the installation of a piece our equipment. From start to finish it was a very interesting application of mechanical vibration to assist in the compaction of a dry material. Throw in a trip to Alaska and it became quite memorable.
Cleveland Vibrator Company was contacted by a large engineering firm that was involved in a remediation project at a military installation in Alaska. The company was removing contaminated soil from the site. The soil was to be placed in steel containers and shipped off site. Their challenge to us was to increase the density of the soil, put more material in the box than could be accomplished with just “dumping” soil into the container. Read More…
Sometimes a screening application cannot be solved by simply placing the product on the sieve surface and allowing the screener to do its job. For example, round screeners are designed to separate material by particle size. However, this simple process can occasionally cause problems or damage to the product and require the HK Ultrasonic Sieving System to properly separate the material, specifcally spherical material like solder powder (see picture).
What happens when spherical material is on the screen surface too long?
Damage or oxidization can occur to the spheres if left on the screen surface too long. Particle size separation is also very critical. More difficult-to-sieve powders fall into different categories based upon size: Type 4 (-400 +635 mesh), Type 5 (-500 mesh), Type 6 (-635 mesh), and Type 7 and 8 which have a slow sieving process.
The Model HK Incline
Recently, a customer inquired about a standard lab fine mesh ultrasonic sieving demo of his Type 4, 5, and 6 solder powder. Solder powder is generally very spherical and sieves very well when applying the HK Ultrasonic Sieving System to the screen surface. Our small lab models use 8” or 12” diameter sieves equipped with our HK Ultrasonic Sieving System.
Just as we thought, he called after a couple of weeks of working with the demo and said the lab unit was very efficient at sieving the powders. However, the length of time the powder spent on the sieve surface damaged his spheres. We explained that we will need to remove the covers off the screen surface in a much quicker time frame while still removing all of the fines.
Our suggestion was to try our HK Incline. To visualize, please check out the video below. The HK Incline is a very unique Ultrasonic Sieving System that utilizes rectangular screen frames and no mechanical vibration. We designed the HK Incline to rely strictly on ultrasonic energy to move the powder down the screen surface.
Model: HK Incline
Here’s how it works:
You load a small hopper/feeder with your powder and a small electromagnetic feeder feeds the powder onto our special ultrasonic rectangular sieve frames. While the ultrasonics are pulsing on/off, the powder is moving down the screen surface. The fine grain particles pass through the sieve either on to a second mesh or into a fine grain collection funnel. The oversized materials are discharged off the ends of the screen frames into collection containers.
Moreover, what we like about this style of equipment is the ability to adjust the feed rate and product yield. There is a little bit of magic on our end in designing the screen frames and adhering the sieve material to the frames but the end result is a very efficient Ultrasonic Sieving System. Check out this product data-sheet to learn more.
So, back to the customer. After trying out the HK Incline with the HK Ultrasonic Sieving System on his solder powder, he loved it!
Keep in mind, the HK Incline is not for every application. If you have a powder that agglomerates or does not flow well the HK Incline will not be effective. But if you have a fine, free-flowing powder the HK Incline could be your ticket.
Want more information about this product? Contact us today!
Vibratory screening equipment comes in all shapes and sizes. While some are rectangular or round they all pretty much accomplish the same principle which is removing oversize particles from the desired product size. There are a number of variables that can affect the performance of the screens used on your screening equipment. In this blog, I will discuss a number of ways to optimize your vibratory screening equipment. Read More… Share this blog post:
Over the years I have handled hundreds of sales calls. Some are looking for new equipment while others are looking to improve upon an existing application. The majority of the customers who are not looking for new equipment want to increase their “yield” or “productivity” of the final product they are trying to produce. My first question when addressing their issue is what is the percentage of “good” product are they losing in the oversize material in their screener? While some have a good idea of this amount others have no idea what the correlation between yield and oversize has to do with each other. Read More… Share this blog post:
Recently a customer inquired about purchasing a new lab test sieve shaker. His current laboratory sieve was an old, noisy, clunker of a test sieve shaker (I don’t think I need to name names…..). He was complaining of too many fines in the product – ground glass powder. While the customer seemed to think his lab shaker was operating properly, he was concerned the test results were not accurate. However, the end-user of his product was also complaining Read More…
As a custom equipment manufacturer, we have quite a bit of flexibility in what we can offer. Sometimes a screening application calls for requirements that a standard vibratory screener just cannot accommodate.
Recently, a customer asked us to redesign his powder metal screening operation in order to provide additional headroom for an additional piece of equipment. His application requirements were a vacuum, two-deck screening, and ultrasonics on both screen decks PLUS he wanted to increase production. He currently was also Read More… Share this blog post:
Several weeks ago, I was reading an article in one of the technical journals discussing the variety of ways to eliminate screen blinding on vibratory equipment. The article discussed a number of “old school” solutions such as rubber balls, clean rings, spray nozzles and brushes. These methods have been around for decades and produce a low to moderate level of success in keeping the screen surface from blinding or clogging. The article also discussed the most effective solution for screen deblinding – Ultrasonics. While it is the most effective, ultrasonic deblinding systems are also the most expensive. If you are not familiar with ultrasonics Read More… Share this blog post:
As the Sales Manager here at HK Technologies, I run across many unique and challenging screening applications on a weekly basis. While this is my first post and I have a lot of interesting applications to discuss, I want to begin with a recent application where a customer was using ultrasonic sieving to screen a high-value ceramic powder used in the electronics industry. The screen mesh was fairly coarse – 80 mesh. The ceramic powder was agglomerating and forming hard nodules of ceramic material from the current supplier’s ultrasonic system. The customer could not tolerate these hard nodules contaminating the final product. They approached us for a solution.
Pic 1 Pic 2 Pic 3 – HK Tranducer – no screen contact
