Lab Scale Vibrating Screen Study on Operational Variables that Affect the Separation Efficiency

Abstract

Vibrating screening is an equipment of simple design and execution, but its full description may be difficult to predict, considering that several variables can influence it. This work evaluates the effects of the independent variables: proportion of particles larger than the screen aperture size, average feed rate and g-force on the separation efficiency of coarse particles in a lab scale vibrating screening, where the material to be screened was phosphate rock, with density of 3.25 g/cm3 and particle size range of 0.6–600 μm. For this, a central composite design (CCD) was applied to quantify the main effects of the variables. As a result, the average feed rate was not relevant and the proportion of coarse particles and the g-force contributed positively to the increase of the efficiency. The point where the variables have their highest values, the maximum experimental efficiency was observed (94.93%).