Not sure if this is in the right place or not but it looked like an interesting comunity, i have a project i need some help with.
I have a mixture of sand and water and i want to get the sand out of the water as a continuos flow process, industrially either a vibration table or an auger would be used, i like the vibration table idea because there is less wear, normally an inclined screen is vibrated such that the water passes through the screen and the sand is conveyed uphill, so i knocked up a test machince out of some bits of steel and an electric drill, it works great only my sand goes downhill not uphill, i imaging tis is to do with the magnitude of my vibrations, they are not large enough to defy gravity only to mobilise the sand to move downhill, does anybody have any suggestions for how i can make bigger/better vibrations which wont cost the earth or deafen my neighbours? Or alternatively a completely different method?
Why not just reverse the flow? Let the mixture go in on the upper end, and the sand exit at the lower end?
If you really want the sand to go up hill, you may need to look at the waveform of your vibrations. Rather than just random vibration, or vibrations in a horizontal plane, you may need a sinusoidal vibration in the vertical plane. For example, the mesh under the sand goes down, back, up, and then forward, such that the sand is momentarily suspended above the mesh while the mesh is moving backwards, but is in contact with the mesh when it's moving forward. And, no, I don't know how to produce that type of vibration (I'm an electrical engineer, not a mechanical engineer.), but I'd guess some type of motor with an eccentric weight on the shaft. Maybe.
Or, something like that.
Have you researched how the sluice ways used by the early Gold miners worked to separate Gold dust/particles from water worked? That seems awfully similar to what you're trying to do.