Roberts & Schaefer has awarded Joest an order to build nine multi-slope screens for Teck’s Elkview coal preparation plant in Sparwood, BC, Canada. These screens are part of a new heavy media plant upgrade to the existing coal prep plant. Three of the nine screens will be 4.3 m wide, making them the widest screens anywhere in North America. Joest’s proven experience with these massively sized screens is evidenced by many successful implementations around the world. The company’s expertise in screening technology combined with its unique manufacturing capabilities makes it one of a handful of manufacturers in the world who can engineer and build a 4.3 m wide coal screen. Over the last 10 years in particular, Joest has supplied several of these screens to the Chinese coal industry, where they have run reliably under very demanding conditions.

Each of the three 4.3 m wide x 8.6 m long screens with PU screen panels is designed to handle 600 t/h of raw coal with 1,060 m3/h of water and 330 m3/h of additional spraying water. With these nine multi-slope screens, Joest is able to replace about 30 regular screens as well as increase the total plant capacity. One of the aspects that makes these mammoth screens difficult to design and build is the high stress areas that will experience force of over 6 G. Through finite element calculation (FEA), Joest analyses and identifies stress points, and has developed unique design features that are critical to efficient and dependable operation when increasing a screen from an 2.4-3 m wide body to a 3.7-4.3 m wide body.