Re: Clay Screening
What is the condition of the raw material? Is it dripping wet clay?
What size are you looking to separate down to? 1/2" minus?
How big are the large rocks you want to ensure get separated out? 6"+
You mention a Bobcat, what sort of throughput are you going to need in tons per hour or yards per hour?
Here is a you tube video of a small, bobcat-loaded trommel that is processing screening freshly dug Georgia red clay. It has a grizzly to scalp off large rocks and a hammermill to pulverize the clumps of clay prior to them being fed into the trommel drum.
The trommel action will aerate the material some and the stockpiling conveyor will aerate it some more but obviously the wetter the raw material the tougher time you'll have. There are pictures of specs of the machine at the manufacturer's website though it doesn't show the fines conveyor. ■
Re: Clay Screening
What is the condition of the raw material? Is it dripping wet clay?
The raw material is lacustrine clay and lacustrine silt, along with some sand and soil. It will all be coming from an area that used to be covered by a pond that we are going to drain and also from along the edges of the pond, so most, if not all of the material will be quite wet.
What size are you looking to separate down to? 1/2" minus?
About that. It eventually has to go through a scanner but I am not totally sure what size of material it can handle, I'll talk to one of the guys who knows more about it when he is back in the office.
How big are the large rocks you want to ensure get separated out? 6"+
There shouldn't be many rocks close to that size. We are only going down about 1m I believe.
You mention a Bobcat, what sort of throughput are you going to need in tons per hour or yards per hour?
As of right now I have no idea. The guy who threw this at me has no idea either.
That trommel screen looks like it would work well for this, although some sort of drying process might be necessary before the material goes into it. Since the material is contaminated some sort of dust control may be necessary, unless respirators are feasible. All of this will be going under a Sprung structure. ■
Re: Clay Screening
When you say 1m do you mean 1 mesh? Or was that a typo for 1mm or perhaps 10 mesh?
1 mesh would be 1" openings, which is not unusual for clay based topsoil applications but it seems large for what you are describing.
Is your intention to wet screen the material with spray bars or are you hoping to screen it without an external water source, just the moisture that is in it?
Also if you could tell us what specific machine it is you are planning on using for the contamination scanner it would help people with making recommendations for your application.
Also what is the nature of the contamination and will there be any sort of OSHA or EPA requirements on site for material handling? ■
Re: Clay Screening
I meant we will only be excavating down about a one meter under the surface. The pond is manmade so there isn't too much worry about big rocks like that.
I'm not really sure how to go about screening it - I'm a computer science major summer student with nothing better to do 
.
http://www.antech-inc.com/Products/G...1000/index.htm
This is the machine that will perform the scanning. The contamination is from 0.5Ci of Cs-137 being put into the pond about 40 years ago.
I'm not sure if Cs-137 can become impacted on rocks. If so, we will need some way of crushing them and putting them through the scanner.
Thanks for all the help so far.
Edit: I was just talking to our guy who is doing all the talking to the company and he is saying our monitoring is going to be low enough that that throughput of it all is basically neglible because we are definately going to be ending up stockpiling material. We will be scraping the bottom of the pond and surrounding area, running it through the machine while subsequently doing analysis of the material under what was just scraped to see if it is contaminated and further digging is required.
With that information I know now we will be using a bobcat with a 1 yard bucket, but as I said the throughput hardly matters now. I'll try and find a number for how fast the separator can sort material ■
Easy Job Actually
There are quite a few machine makes that will nicely do that SEPARATION.
Some mentioned here, but lots more available.
George ■
Re: Clay Screening
I'm sure it would be quite easy for someone who knows about this stuff, but I know absolutely nothing about it, nor where to find the information. ■
Clay Screening
Looks like wobbler feeder may work for this material. You may have to select one in consultation with equipment supplier.
https://forum.bulk-online.com/showthread.php?t=14783 ■
Clay Screening
My current project involves remediating a contaminated pond to a green state. We already have a machine that will sort and segregate soil based on if it is contaminated or not but the pond is mainly lacustrine silt and clay along with some sand.
What I need to do is find the machines that will allow a bobcat to load the material into, something to get rid of large rocks, something to dry the clay to allow for it to be made into small pieces and not plug the contamination scanner ■