Eriez touts the success of its Shred1 ballistic separators

Since it released the Shred1 ballistic separator six years ago, Eriez, Erie, Pennsylvania, says it has installed units in various shredding yards, steel mills and slag processing facilities throughout North America. These separators use ballistics to upgrade frag by segregating the copper-bearing materials from the rest of the ferrous materials. Customers using Shred1 units report increased revenues and reduced overhead, the company says.

Shred1 Separators deliver two distinct fractions: a premium low-copper ferrous product and a traditional No. 2 shred. In operation, material is presented to a high-speed (1,000-feet-per-minute) belt and passed over a magnetic head pulley. Ferrous with low copper content sticks to the magnetic pulley and is dragged behind the splitter. Larger materials, which are less magnetic because of their size, shape and copper content, are influenced more by the speed of the belt than by the attraction of the magnet, getting thrown over the splitter.

The low copper material, or No. 1 shred, is about 75 percent of the total material volume, Eriez says. It goes directly to a stacking conveyor without going through a picking conveyor. The No. 1 fraction is typically 0.16 to 0.17 percent copper.

Eriez Recycling Product Manager Chris Ramsdell says, “This No. 1 shred fraction has proven to be very desirable to steel mills.”

The No. 2 fraction, high in copper, is the other 25 percent of the total material, according to Eriez. It goes through a manual picking station to recover copper-bearing material. 

“We have customers that used to manually pick 7 pounds per ton of ferrous processed,” Ramsdell says. “After installing the Shred1, the pickings went to 13 pounds per ton.” He adds, “This is being accomplished with reduced picking labor because they only need to pick through 25 percent of the ferrous stream. Pickers are more efficient because of reduced volume.”

Eriez says it has made a few minor modifications to the design of Shred1 since the machine’s 2011 introduction.

“A couple of years ago, we added a third pulley that directs the frag down and away from the underside of the machine and into the No. 1 shred (low-copper) chute,” Ramsdell says. “We also redesigned access panels and bearing covers to allow for greater maintenance accessibility.”

 Some customers combine the Shred1 with an Eriez P-Rex® permanent rare earth magnetic drum, effectively improving their entire process, according to Eriez. This system, referred to as the CleanStream Process, recovers more ferrous metals and concentrates 75 percent of the postdrum magnet flow into a low-copper premium shred, the company says. It also eliminates the need for a scavenger magnet, a z-box air system and hand picking the entire flow. Ramsdell says by using the CleanStream Process, processors have increased their revenues.