Van Beek, Drunen, the Netherlands, was recently posed a challenging question: Could it fabricate a 17.5m stainless steel screw conveyor in one piece? The Van Mourik Group needed two long screws to fill silos for its client, Poederoijen-based Feed Valid (previously Covaco). Van Beek had never done this before, but quickly calculated that it was feasible and so went to work. Feed Valid makes raw materials for the cattle feed industry. One of these raw materials is a toasted soya product, a hot moist mixture that needs to be transported a considerable height to be stored in silos.

 

Project manager Edwin Mentink of the Van Mourik Group said that a bucket elevator would not have been suitable for this application. "This is why we quickly chose the screw conveyor." Because of the great height and the hot sticky product, it became immediately clear that a stainless steel screw conveyor was required. Although the Van Mourik Group also makes screw conveyors itself and regularly uses screw conveyors in projects, this was its first cooperation with Van Beek. "Normally we focus more on a different market for which stainless steel is not necessary", Mentink explained.

 

Van Beek supplied one SS304 vertical screw of 17.5m and one of 14.5m, each fitted with a pusher screw to keep it filled. The capacity of each screw is around 30t/h. The energy consumption of the shorter screw is 30kWh and of the long screw 37kWh. www.van-beek.nl

 

 

The longer of the two Van Beek vertical screws being craned into position