Are you experiencing any delays in your fine mesh screening processes? Do you find that your materials get clogged in the mesh of your screen deck? Finding a solution to roadblocks can be difficult. Ultrasonic Vibratory Sieving Systems can assist in making this process easier. Let’s dive deeper into them and learn more about what they can do for your production.
What is an Ultrasonic Sieving System?
A simple description of Ultrasonics is that they are high-frequency vibrations that go through screen mesh to relieve surface tension. By applying Ultrasonics, you can improve the throughput of materials up to 10x. You may also experience a boost in productivity when used with your vibratory sieve.
Jeff Hochadel has over 25 years of experience building and selling vibratory screening equipment. Jeff is responsible for handling fine mesh screening applications for The Cleveland Vibrator Company. His expertise is utilizing our Ultrasonic Deblinding System to solve difficult screening problems. When Jeff is not visiting customers promoting our products you can most likely find him fly fishing.
The typical customer who calls or emails with a process question has either hundreds of pounds per hour or tons of material per hour to screen. Although these may be the majority of the applications, I do get many inquiries where the customer only has to process maybe 20 or 30lbs/hr. (or less) but still needs a vibratory screener. These small-batch screening applications are sometimes a little more challenging to solve than the typical large-batch application. Some applications may require a much finer mesh, there’s not much room to work with, or the material is extremely valuable. Besides our standard screeners, we also have the capability to manufacture a special screener around the customer’s process. I don’t know how many times I have seen an overly large vibratory screener handling an application where a screener half the size would suffice.
So, we first need to determine how much material the customer plans on running through the screener per hour or per shift, then we need to determine the mesh size requirements. We need to answer two questions: Read More…
Jeff Hochadel has over 25 years of experience building and selling vibratory screening equipment. Jeff is responsible for handling fine mesh screening applications for The Cleveland Vibrator Company. His expertise is utilizing our Ultrasonic Deblinding System to solve difficult screening problems. When Jeff is not visiting customers promoting our products you can most likely find him fly fishing.
During the process of manufacturing paints or other coatings, one of the steps involved is milling or grinding all of the dry ingredients into the liquid portion of the paint. These dry or solids consist of Titanium Dioxide (TIO2) pigments, binders, and various other powders. The liquid portion is mainly solvent or in the case of latex base – water. Once all of these dry ingredients have been thoroughly mixed (the proper term is dispersed) into the liquid base of the paint, the next step involves a high shear, high energy process called media milling.
In a nutshell, the paint is run through a chamber that has an enclosed horizontal shaft with discs or blades. The chamber is also filled with very small, spherical, grinding media. The media is made of different materials such as glass, steel, and ceramic media. Read More…
Jeff Hochadel has over 25 years of experience building and selling vibratory screening equipment. Jeff is responsible for handling fine mesh screening applications for The Cleveland Vibrator Company. His expertise is utilizing our Ultrasonic Deblinding System to solve difficult screening problems. When Jeff is not visiting customers promoting our products you can most likely find him fly fishing.
Liquid ceramic glaze or clay slurry materials are used in a variety of products and applications ranging from decorative and protective glazes to tile glaze or electrical porcelains. Typically this material starts with either Koalin clays or ceramic powders mixed with water or other liquids to form a slurry. Depending on the application this slurry will need to be screened to remove any agglomerates (powders that did not get dispersed during the mixing process). This is a very important step because, in many applications, this slurry or slip will eventually be applied to an exterior surface either as a decorative or possibly a protective coating. In either case, the coating needs to be free of any oversize agglomerates or debris allowing for an attractive smooth finish free of any pits or blemishes. The finer the screen or sieve used, the better or smoother the finish.
Depending on the application, screening can range from simply pouring the slip or slurry through a filter bag with a relatively coarse mesh to using vibratory screeners with finer mesh sizes – down to 120 mesh or maybe finer. This is where the difficulties begin. Read More…
Jeff Hochadel has over 25 years of experience building and selling vibratory screening equipment. Jeff is responsible for handling fine mesh screening applications for The Cleveland Vibrator Company. His expertise is utilizing our Ultrasonic Deblinding System to solve difficult screening problems. When Jeff is not visiting customers promoting our products you can most likely find him fly fishing.
Many times a potential customer will call our office or email asking for a quote and delivery on a specific type of equipment. Our standard response involves asking the customer a series of questions ranging from what the product is, estimated throughput rates, percentage of plus and minus screen size, and others. We typically also ask for an application data sheet to be filled out. All this helps remove the guesswork out of equipment sizing. Sometimes the customer thinks he knows what is required based on past experience or what someone else has told him he needs. While many times these assumptions may be correct, we want to make sure what we sell the customer will ultimately meet or exceed their expectations. While filling out forms and asking questions definitely assists in proper screener selection, I have found asking for a sample of the product for in house testing eliminates all the guesswork out of the equipment selection process. If time permits and the customer requires we can also send out a demonstration model for a short in-house testing period.
Running tests on a sample or sending out a demonstration model will ultimately remove all the guesswork out of equipment selection. Read More…
Jeff Hochadel has over 25 years of experience building and selling vibratory screening equipment. Jeff is responsible for handling fine mesh screening applications for The Cleveland Vibrator Company. His expertise is utilizing our Ultrasonic Deblinding System to solve difficult screening problems. When Jeff is not visiting customers promoting our products you can most likely find him fly fishing.
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…
Jeff Hochadel has over 25 years of experience building and selling vibratory screening equipment. Jeff is responsible for handling fine mesh screening applications for The Cleveland Vibrator Company. His expertise is utilizing our Ultrasonic Deblinding System to solve difficult screening problems. When Jeff is not visiting customers promoting our products you can most likely find him fly fishing.
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!
Jeff Hochadel has over 25 years of experience building and selling vibratory screening equipment. Jeff is responsible for handling fine mesh screening applications for The Cleveland Vibrator Company. His expertise is utilizing our Ultrasonic Deblinding System to solve difficult screening problems. When Jeff is not visiting customers promoting our products you can most likely find him fly fishing.
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…
Jeff Hochadel has over 25 years of experience building and selling vibratory screening equipment. Jeff is responsible for handling fine mesh screening applications for The Cleveland Vibrator Company. His expertise is utilizing our Ultrasonic Deblinding System to solve difficult screening problems. When Jeff is not visiting customers promoting our products you can most likely find him fly fishing.
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…
Jeff Hochadel has over 25 years of experience building and selling vibratory screening equipment. Jeff is responsible for handling fine mesh screening applications for The Cleveland Vibrator Company. His expertise is utilizing our Ultrasonic Deblinding System to solve difficult screening problems. When Jeff is not visiting customers promoting our products you can most likely find him fly fishing.
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…
Jeff Hochadel has over 25 years of experience building and selling vibratory screening equipment. Jeff is responsible for handling fine mesh screening applications for The Cleveland Vibrator Company. His expertise is utilizing our Ultrasonic Deblinding System to solve difficult screening problems. When Jeff is not visiting customers promoting our products you can most likely find him fly fishing.
