The dross from a non-ferrous furnace needs to be cleaned out and separated from bulky materials, such as contamination from iron fittings or similar. The material temperatures are as high as 500°C, but sometimes up to 1.000°C resulting from iron nests. The fall height of the dross is at least 15.000mm. But the key requirement is to reduce the maintenance and access time for this equipment. The existing machinery is bolted to various supports and to the floor. The room height inside the acoustic booth is limited making it difficult to move parts by fork lifts. Dismantling, maintenance and re-assembly is taking at least two days with a lot of work force.

The required machinery is a quite reasoned setup. Because of the fall height the dross needs to be collected on a vibratory trough conveyor. The high conveying good temperature gives the demand for a special heat expandable trough which is realized by special materials, spacers and a bolt on design giving the trough enough room to expand. This vibratory trough conveyor ensures the metered feeding of a vibratory screen, similar to a continuous shake out. The screening surface is designed in steps revolving the conveying good. The gaps are expanding their width in conveying direction. This guarantees no pinching or jamming of any larger parts. The clou is the easy exchangeability in segments of the screening surface just by standard bolts.

The most time saving arrangement is a co-operational idea together with the customer. Why not using a combined substructure for both machines together, which can be mounted and released with a couple of fasteners quickly. The complete structure needs easy rollability moving the complete setup at once, but also reliable fixture when needed, and also being light weight, but also strong in design.

A strong frame was designed which can be lifted up by six simple push up rollers made from steel with a convex surface reducing the roll resistance. The rollers are suspended by heat resistant friction bearings which enables two persons only pushing the complete set up, weighing over 8 tons, by hand easily. Before lifting and moving, the set up needs to be loosened from the anchor plates by standard bolts and the unbalanced motors are unplugged.

This pretty unique solution is saving up to 75% of maintenance time, compared to the previous solution, after it was installed. Time consuming dismantling, chain hoist lifting, dragging and pulling is eliminated by the well elaborated design.