CONTINUAL DEVELOPMENT OVER more than 20 years has delivered a revised shredder
design that is better performing with lower associated life cycle costs. Sucrogen now
operates eleven shredders installed at the eight sugar mills from Macknade in the north
to Plane Creek in the south. Due to historical acquisitions of sugar mills there are
variations in the configurations of these eleven machines. While previous attempts have
been made to standardise components, there were seven different hammers required for the eleven different machines. There were also two different rotor designs with seven standard Walkers type shredders and four Goninan type shredders. No detailed analysis had been conducted to compare the merits of the various shredder designs with respect to performance and whole of life cost. The objectives for the revised shredder design were to improve group shredding performance, resulting in improved sugar recovery, and to reduce total life cost for shredders in the group. This paper presents design improvements for the shredder grid, rotor, hammers and hammer tips to realise these objectives. Finite element analysis was used to predict the stress distribution in the shredder hammers and discs.