The Polish company FBSerwis needed a reliable shredder to crush municipal solid waste with particle sizes greater than 80 mm and process mixtures of plastics. Vecoplan replaced an old machine in the company’s existing line with an energy-efficient VVZ 2500 pre-shredder, which is designed for a throughput of roughly 42 tonnes per hour. Thanks to this system, the customer is now able to shred almost 200,000 tonnes of waste each year, producing high-quality output with particle sizes below 250 mm.

Vecoplan, based in Bad Marienberg in Germany’s Westerwald region, develops systems for shredding, conveying and processing plastics, wood, biomass, paper and domestic and commercial waste. The company employs some 500 people worldwide and its tasks include consultancy, planning and finding solutions, providing integrated project management, including installation, commissioning and comprehensive service. Vecoplan installed a VVZ 2500 T pre-shredder in response to the company's needs. This double-shaft shredder can even process difficult and contaminated materials such as domestic and commercial waste. The pre-shredder was integrated into the existing line and removed the old machine.

Vecoplan’s application engineers matched the system to the customer’s input and output requirements by installing suitable rotors and blades and selecting the right screen. They fine-tuned these components according to the FBSerwis’ needs by means of numerous tests at Vecoplan’s in-house technical centre. At all times they were in touch with the customer in order to determine the requirements for the optimum particle size in the downstream process. The experts selected rotor diameters, cutting geometries, screens and cutting tools to correspond to the mechanical properties, thermal properties and dimensions of the input material and the output requirements.

Front-end loaders pick up the input material and take it to a conveyor system which feeds the new pre-shredder. The machine, which is equipped with replaceable knives and counter knives to achieve consistent granularity, shreds the material to a uniform particle size of less than 250 mm. The robust VVZ is equipped with an energy-efficient HiTorc drive. This dynamic, quick-start, high-torque synchronous drive has a power of 247 kW and is regulated by a 315 kW frequency converter. It requires no mechanical elements such as belt drives, flywheels or couplings. The HiTorc drive is very efficient and much less sensitive to impurities. It also requires much less maintenance than belt and hydraulic drives. After pre-shredding, the material is further processed. A magnetic separator removes all ferrous materials, and an air separator then separates the material flow into heavy and light fractions. The machine is flexible and focuses on energy-efficient operation. It even shreds difficult materials with high-quality results and at a high throughput.