Trommel Sieves (Sifters)

Hello everyone,

We just purchased / are having built a custom Trommel Sieve / sifter thing for our yard. We have been over the specs time and time again with our equipment / facilities guy and production manager, but I was wondering if anyone on here had experience using one of these.

The spec are as follows: 5m long x 3.5m high. Has three sections; 1st has 2mm opening for sand / dirt, 2nd has 2mm - 3cm for small material, 3rd has 3cm - 8cm for larger material, and the rest of the "large" material comes out the end. The Loading section is a 2m x 4m flat bed with vibrating motor and 50cm sides. Should be able to hold about 1.5 shovels from our loader. The gear system is outside the cylinder so there is no axis or spokes for wires, aluminum strips to get caught on. Material is SS and iron.

We currently start our process by selecting out heavy material (large engines, motors, big iron pieces etc), then our plan is to put the separated material into our new sifter after which we should have clean material in 3 sizes for our people to further separate into the appropriate piles. (iron, SS, Alu, Cu wires, etc). Our current problem is that our material is very dusty and has lots of sand and other small material so it takes our people a long time to sift through everything to get to the good stuff. We did a few tests on "clean" material and our people could separate almost twice as fast.

I was wondering if anyone else is using one of these types of sifter and if so, what has been your experience? What should we watch out for? etc. The photo below is just an example. Ours is a custom job. I hope it turns out like our drawings!

Thanks in advance!



USG

Are you feeding it off a shredder?

Quick follow up.

The end goal is to have the trommel empty on to a conveyor belt. Then that material can be separated assembly line style by our workers. Again, looking for anyone who has experience with a similar set up.

Thanks to all!

USG

Is the dust magnetic?

@Amnelson

Unfortunately not. We tried that. We also tried adding some magnets to the trommel design to catch the iron before it even got out, but our designer wasn't very experienced in that so we let it go. If anyone has done it, where do you place the magnets? How do you stop them from taking every little piece of iron up with it! (We noticed that SS, Alu, etc. with little iron screws or caps got picked up by the magnet as will. Turned out to be more hassle than it was worth.)

One other suggestion to any that are looking at similar designs is to add a place for a hose to "wash" the material. When it rains or we get some really wet material, the dust / dirt tends to stick to the material. We heard that by washing it down in the trommel, the water will filter down through the 2mm holes and give us the same result. Lets hope it actually works.

Thanks Gustav,

We did a test with one of these. The end result was decent, but the problems we ran in to were as follows:

1) WAY too much open air dust. Our yard is relatively small and has a lot of workers. It created a super dusty environment for the other workers in the yard.
2) Could only set to 1 size of material. We ended up with "cleaner" material, but still not as clean as we wanted.
3) Logistics with our loader / backhoe. We ended up having to use him to dump the material on the screen, shake out the material, move the screen to clear the material, and then also clear the dust. Ended up being a time consuming process. Again, our yard is small and has a lot of people so, for safety reasons, I hate having that HUGE machine running around all the time. Just asking for trouble.

That said, the good things that we took away from the test were:
1) Material is cleaner and easier to sort.
2) The screen is cheap and can be made "at home" with little technical expertise. One note to anyone that might be making one of these, try putting springs on one end of the screen so your loader can "bounce" the material a little. This helps it move through and off the screen.

Take care,

USG

@mechanic688

Man I wish. I'll post some pics of our yard sometime so all can get a better idea. The main issue is the dust / dirt in the containers from our mixed metal supplier. When our containers arrive, they get dumed into the rest of our big pile and then depending on the weather (rain or shine) we get a build up of dirt / dust. I guess we should probably look for an enclosed yard, but that comes with it's own problems. --- All that said, if anyone knows of a dust collecting system that can be used outside on a dirt / concrete floor (which generates its own dust), please let me know.

Yeah, this thread is all about the dust. That's why we are getting the sieve in the first place. And just to clarify, the dust / dirt isn't an issue in and of itself, but when mixed with our material it really slows down our workers who are separating out the small material. With labor costs on the rise, I am on a campaign for efficiency.

Thanks to all for the great suggestion!

USG