What’s the Difference Between Helicoid Flighting and Sectional Flights?
Augers provide a critical function for the conveyance of materials. Smooth operation depends upon the precision of the auger fins or blades, commonly referred to as flights. There are two main processes used in the production of auger flights: helicoid and sectional.
Formation of each type involves a different process and produces unique characteristics.
What Are Sectional Flights?
Sectional flights are auger blades individually formed from plate steel into a helix. The process for creating sectional flights goes as follows:
- The process begins with a piece of plate steel cut into a donut shape with a specified inside diameter (ID) and outside diameter (OD).
- A press shapes them into the form of a helix.
- Each of these helixes is an individual component joined to create a series of flights or a continuous helix.
- Final formation of the auger includes attaching the finished continuous helix to a shaft.
Sectional flights are of uniform in thickness from their ID edge to their OD edge.
The sectional flight process allows for a greater variation in design, material thickness, and material used, but more handling is required to form sectional flights into a finished auger.
What Is Helicoid Flighting?
Rather than formation in sections, helicoid flighting are created as a continuous helix formed from a single piece of carbon or stainless steel. This process includes:
- Rolling machines with cone-shaped dies are set to specific ID and OD dimensions to transform a strip of steel stock by rolling it into a single continuous helix.
- This compression process causes the OD edges to become thinner in contrast to the uniformity of sectional flights.
Forming a single helix saves time and money, but there are limitations as to the materials, design, and material thickness using this method.
Custom Sectional Flight Manufacturing
Reinke & Schomann provides custom sectional flight manufacturing for a wide range of customers and applications in a cost-effective and efficient manner.
We use highly advanced equipment and processes to work with various types of stainless steel, steel, abrasion-resisting steel and nickel alloys in the creation of all our precision sectional flights.
All of our processes surpass CEMA standards. We can produce sectional flights, ribbon flights and helicoid flights in various OD’s, pitches and thicknesses.
Meeting Customer Needs
Reinke & Schomann has many capabilities to fit customer requirements.
We can provide sectional and helicoid flights to best-fit customer applications. We also feature value-added services such as design engineering, assembly, and a variety of finishes and treatments.
Other fabrication capabilities include:
- Angle rolling
- Bending
- Plasma cutting
- Plate forming
- Plate rolling
- Welding
Quality and integrity are at the core of our operations at Reinke & Schomann, Inc.
Contact us or request a quote for more information on how our sectional flight fabrication services can benefit your organization.