Are you planning to include a Virto-Cuccolini sieve within your plant?
Let’s go through some important tips concerning installation and use within a plant so that you can get out the best from Virto-Cuccolini sieving equipment and avoid later issues.
A vibrating or tumbling sieve is a piece of equipment which – differently from any other comparable processing equipment – needs to move.
Of course, a sieve must be firmly installed on the ground or on a suitable structure, studied to exclude resonance phenomenon both when the sieve is running dry or with the product. In case such a phenomenon appears, please consider reinforcing the structure accordingly.
Apart from the bottom part of the sieve, which hosts fixation holes (in its basement or frame), the rest of the sieve structure is moving during the sieving process by vibration or tumbling.
Therefore, the sieve needs to be installed in a suitable area in which no other rigid structure is present around the sieve in a position that may interfere with the sieve’ movements.
Analogously, all inlets and outlets must have a flexible connection, in a minimum measure covering 1.5 times the diameter of the inlet or outlet (i.e. diameter 200 mm requires a flexible connection D200 with a minimum height of 300 mm). This means that feeding and discharging equipment shall remain at a reasonable distance from the sieve. Moreover, flanges are not suitable for connection; nothing shall hang from the outlets but the flexible connection alone.
The sieve is supported by springs; in case the springs are bending or inclined, this means that something is interfering with the sieve stability (maybe some other piping) and a check around the sieve is required.
Moreover, around the sieve, there must be enough room to allow periodical checks and maintenance. Consider for instance that the mesh supporting ring, whose dimensions are equal to the diameter of the sieve, may need to be disassembled from the machine to allow mesh replacement. With medium and big diameters and depending on the height at which the sieve is installed if not directly at the ground floor, lifting equipment may be needed to carry out this replacement.
Another important concept to remember is that a sieve can never be used as a buffer. Meshes and their supporting ring are not engineered to support weight, but just a time-limited passage of product through the mesh. Product weighing on the mesh may cause the mesh to relax or even mesh breakage, apart from being a major disruption within the range of allowed vibrations, potentially damaging so the structure of the sieve.