An experimentally validated rubber shear spring model for vibrating flip-flow screens

Abstract

Vibrating flip-flow screens (VFFS) provide an effective solution for screening highly moist and fine-grained minerals, and the dynamic response of the main and the floating screen frames largely accounts for a VFFS’s screening performance and its processing capacity. An accurate dynamic model of the rubber shear springs inserted between the frames of the VFFS is critical for its dynamic analysis but has rarely been studied in detail. In this paper, a variance-based global sensitivity analysis is applied to actually illustrate that the rubber shear spring is the most important component for the dynamics of VFFS. Then a nonlinear rubber shear spring model is proposed to predict its amplitude and frequency dependency, which is described by a friction model and a fractional derivative viscoelastic model, respectively, and the elasticity is predicted by a nonlinear spring. The reasonability of the proposed model is verified by experimental cyclic tests of the rubber shear spring. Comparisons between the newly proposed model and other classic models, including the Generalized Maxwell model, adopted for the dynamic analysis of the VFFS are carried out, and experimental tests of an industrial VFFS’s dynamic response show that dynamics of the VFFS can be better described using the proposed model than the existing models. Furthermore, the method of the global sensitivity analysis is also applied to the newly VFFS dynamic model to calculate the sensitivities of model outputs caused by the input parameters. The results reveal that the dynamic response of an operating VFFS is most sensitive to changes in the stiffness of the rubber shear spring, followed by the mass of the floating screen frames.