Welcome
Looks like the one Posted just above is a knudson style, However looks like yours has a spiral shape, can you elaborate on how well it works on ultra fine where that gravity number is so very critical? I know a lot of people swear by Neff bowls.
Thank you StreamlineGold, it's always nice to find a group of folks with similar interest, especially in the mining world.
There have been dozens of folks who have attempted or successfully made some type of centrifugal bowls over the past 60 plus years, all with varying success. Until recently, Larry Neff's Neffco bowls have been the mainstream system that has been readily available over the years. My first centrifuge bowl was a Neffco back about ten years ago and was using it in my ball mill circuit.
I plan on providing some very detailed information very soon as to the differences in the bowl designs across the board so that it better explains how we came about the design that we have. But for ease of context, you have low and high gravity bowls, and ours as well as Neffco's is considered a low gravity bowl, they run around 6g's, compared to 150-300g's, in a pressurized fluidization bed design.
The Neffco's bowl is a single, continuous riffle in the bowl, about 100 feet of riffles to be exact. Ours is a 5-Lead riffle, 8-Lead for our Triple Bowl, each riffle composing of approximately 19.4 feet in length. Regardless of salesmanship and advertising smoke, the ability to have more than a single riffle is inherently better. It is an ability to, in basic visual terms to go from a fine pitch screw to a coarse pitch screw, a wedge so to speak. The significant difficulty with any centrifugal system is having a means of the material not to pack, which will cause you to lose your fluidization bed in the riffles. By increasing the angle of the riffles, which is where the multi-leads come into play, forces the material to move more effectively along the riffles while rotating, thereby preventing the packing issue. As I said, through all the smoke and mirrors of salesmanship, the increased riffles are always better, but very, very difficult to manufacture in production.
(Gold recovered with Bowl)
It took us over $140K to develop just the bowl section to provide an entirely manufactured system in-house. I'm a Tool & Die machinist by trade, so, fortunately, we can make all the molds in-house; otherwise, the cost would have been about $300K more. Working with my cousin, who is a mechanical engineer at Nasa and directly with 3M, gave me some critical information we were needing. Along with a retired engineer who worked on the Space Shuttle, came up with a way to reliably bond and install the 5 spiral leads into our bowl. And yes, I thought for a few months that this damn thing was going to Mars, unbelievably complicated initially to make this design. I have built components for the Space Shuttle and various other aerospace and space vehicles over the years, and this is was much more challenging to come to the final product. There's a reason why gold's value is so high.
I plan on providing some in-depth information along with pictures to give people the visual difference in the designs. A significant byproduct of the 5-lead bowl, unintentional, but very nice is that you can clean the bowl out about five times faster than a single lead bowl. Since you are only rinsing 19.4 feet per riffle, rather than over 100 feet.
To address the issue with extremely small gold recovery, 200-500 mesh gold, you MUST have a fluidization bed always working. If you have any compaction or loss of your fluidization bed in your centrifugal bowl, you will immediately lose any fine particle gold. We built this design specifically for the ability to recover down to 500 mesh gold.
The picture by tamrock is a picture of our LC-TB32 Centrifugal Bowl at the Elko Expo, of course. In remaining in compliance with board rules, I don't wish to provide further "Sales" data on our equipment directly, but if you have specific questions, I'm happy to answer any of those for you.
