Fine gray-iron chips creating sludge, clogging machine. Hours of downtime cleaning.

[thinkless]

We're running the same product on these lines. A couple of the operations create these very fine chips that end up creating a mud-like sludge on the screens and hinder coolant flow. Has anyone dealt with this issue before? Our line is in the middle of a several hour long cleanup process. I'm looking to some solution to this to avoid having to do it in the future.

Some details:
We only run gray-iron castings on this line. The graphite in the gray iron is less magnetic and I believe this is the bulk of the sludge avoid our magnetic conveyor.
We use a magnetic chip conveyor which seems to collect only the large chips, I don't really see any of the sludge get in there.

If anyone has dealt with this issue and found resolution I'd love to hear how it played out.

Thanks!

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[davek0974]

I've machined a fair bit of cast iron and it was always, without option, machined dry.

We used dust extract and filtration to handle the dust as it is a fair health hazard if not coped with.

[Jim Dawson]

One way to handle that is a moving fine screen conveyor, with a backwash system to clean the screen. I think these are commercially available or pretty easy to build. I have also seen a centrifugal solids separator. We used to use what was like coffee filter material that was on a roll, when it started plugging up, you just pull some fresh material into place and toss the used piece in the trash.