The Importance of Heavy Duty Scalping Screens in Mining Operations

There’s an art to scalping and screening in the mining sector. Quarries also have much to gain here, too, but extracted minerals streams obviously require more fine-tuning. Those valuable earthen commodities require superior sorting solutions, right? Anyway, just as outlined in past posts, mining facilities place a lot of focus on the input stage. This is where the primary crushers reside. Sad to say, this great mechanical maw has a habit of indiscriminately chewing its way through everything it encounters.

The Art of Mineral Scalping

The first-line crushers, the equipment that chews the newly extracted rock piles into smaller, more manageable aggregate loads, they’re really best described as equal opportunity machines. Nothing escapes their mechanically cycling jaws. That means every wayward chunk of waste and material debris is processed and carried forward. Not to worry, mining equipment designers can build in waste rejection systems. At the other end of the waste treatment scale, however, there are “fines” travelling through the line as well. It’s these fines that must be plucked out of the stream by a mine’s heavy-duty scalping station. Herein lies the problem, one that requires a hefty measure of tweakable manual oversight. First things first, the scalping screens require a layer of abrasion-resistant plastic. A polyurethane coating should do the job. Next, let’s drop the diameter of the scalping screen apertures so that the over-fine load is separated from the extracted materials, which will then be further screened as the aggregate stream moves forward.

Heavy-Duty Scalping: Severity-Control Solutions

That’s the key, the fact that all of this gritty waste cannot be allowed to hang out with the mineral-loaded rocks. If the fine earthen grain does accompany the primary stream, it’ll cause a processing bottleneck. The grit blocks screen deck holes. As a result, screen occlusion issues grow worse, pegging and plugging difficulties are aggravated, and the whole process slows to a crawl. Just as bad as the equipment slowdown problems, the lifespan of the screening media is impacted, too. Indeed, every exposed moving part and screening aperture becomes coated in a thick layer of coarse waste, which invariably finds its way into the workings of the machinery. Inevitably, equipment jams and machine breakdowns break out, then the site’s maintenance department has to somehow find enough money and resources to fix the problem.

If a company maintenance division is swallowing up a larger than average chunk of site operating costs, the heavy-duty scalping screens might be damaged. Without these over and under-size material separating mechanisms working at peak efficiency, downstream wear issues are likely. Furthermore, plugging and pegging errors will escalate if the scalping machinery can’t do its job properly.

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