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TPI - Industrial Screw Conveyors
TPI Engineered Systems specializes in the design, manufacturing, procurement, and installation of screw conveyors, which are critical components in bulk material handling. These conveyors, including screw feeders and live-bottom feeders, play a pivotal role in ensuring a consistent discharge rate from storage vessels, thus preventing material stagnation. Despite their simplicity, screw conveyors are often misunderstood and can pose maintenance challenges. TPI leverages its extensive experience to select optimal screw types, trough styles, and materials tailored to specific industrial applications. The company's solutions encompass innovative techniques such as short pitch, variable pitch, and shaftless screws, which address issues like material build-up and accommodate oversized materials. Serving a broad spectrum of industries across the United States, TPI offers custom-engineered conveyor systems designed to meet unique project requirements, ensuring efficient and reliable material processing.Screw conveyors and screw feeders are very simple machines, yet they are probably the least understood, most disliked and highest maintenance pieces of bulk material handling equipment in most plants. Generally, they are considered as a “necessary evil” and tolerated only because there is no better way to do the job.
There are literally thousands of possible combinations of screw conveyor parts, when you factor in all of the different types, styles and material thickness options that are available. Out of those, there may be a hundred combinations that will physically work on any given application, but may result in poor reliability, high maintenance or excessive down time. With these facts in mind, there are two things to remember:
- There’s a big difference between having 20 years of experience, and having 2 years of experience ten times.
- You don’t know what you don’t know.
Our combined 150+ years of hands-on experience in a wide range of industries and applications gives us the ability to select the proper combination of screw type, trough style, hanger style, material type, material thicknesses, and inlet and discharge configuration and so on to make your application a success.
Screw Feeders and Live-Bottom Feeders can be very effective at providing a reliable and repeatable discharge rate from a storage vessel or surge bin. Also, when properly designed, they can provide for a very uniform draw-down across the entire length of the bin discharge, which is valuable for preventing stagnant areas within the bin where material becomes trapped. Our systems ensure your material is processed uniformly; in other words, first-in and-first-out.
Some common methods for achieving a uniform draw-down are short pitch, variable pitch, stepped pitch, tapered flights and cone screw technology. Unfortunately, some of these procedures do not work well in specific applications and can, in some instances, make matters much worse, which is why you need to work with experienced people.
- Extremely versatile
- Totally enclosed dust and weather tight
- Can mix and convey simultaneously
- Convey simultaneously in two directions
- Readily reversible without a soft start
- Can be flood loaded simultaneously at multiple inlet locations
- High temperature materials (1000° +)
- Harsh handling of fragile materials
- Higher power requirements
- Less potential length
- Cross contamination; not self-cleaning
- Maintenance more difficult
- Large spare parts inventory required
- Higher initial cost