Double Shaker Screens

A pair of shaker screens at Morwell sit on their mounting frames in the screen-floor section of the briquette factory, the parallel units identical in design and aligned side by side along the production line. Each screen is a heavy steel-framed unit with the screening deck angled slightly downward toward the discharge end, and the drive motor mounted at one side. The frames are painted SECV grey, scored along the edges where decades of crushed coal passed across the screens. The supporting steel base is bolted to the concrete floor. The light is the cold daylight from the high windows above; the floor beneath the screens carries the standard fine-dust accumulation of a brown-coal processing plant.

Shaker screens sized the crushed lignite by particle size before further processing, with smaller particles passing through the mesh to one downstream flow and larger particles continuing to the next stage. The double arrangement let two screens run in parallel for higher throughput or one as backup while the other was maintained. Morwell's briquette factory operated continuously from 1956 to its final feed on 31 August 2014. Brett photographed the double shaker screens on 30 March 2017.