Grain auger

A screw conveyor or auger conveyor is a mechanism that uses a rotating helical screw blade, called a "flighting", usually within a tube, to move liquid or granular materials. They are used in many bulk handling industries. Screw conveyors in modern industry are often used horizontally or at a slight incline as an efficient way to move semi-solid materials, including food waste, wood chips, aggregates, cereal grains, animal feed, boiler ash, meat and bone meal, municipal solid waste, and many others. The first type of screw conveyor was the Archimedes' screw, used since ancient times to pump irrigation water.

They usually consist of a trough or tube containing either a spiral blade coiled around a shaft, driven at one end and held at the other, or a "shaftless spiral", driven at one end and free at the other. The rate of volume transfer is proportional to the rotation rate of the shaft. In industrial control applications the device is often used as a variable rate feeder by varying the rotation rate of the shaft to deliver a measured rate or quantity of material into a process.

Screw conveyors can be operated with the flow of material inclined upward. When space allows, this is a very economical method of elevating and conveying. As the angle of inclination increases, the capacity of a given unit rapidly decreases.

The rotating part of the conveyor is sometimes called simply an auger.

The "grain auger" is used in agriculture to move grain from trucks, grain carts or grain trailers into grain storage bins (from where it is later removed by gravity chutes at the bottom). A grain auger may be powered by an electric motor; a tractor, through the power take-off; or sometimes an internal combustion engine mounted on the auger. The helical rotates inside a long metal tube, moving the grain upwards. On the lower end, a hopper receives grain from the truck or grain cart. A chute on the upper end guides the grain into the destination location.

The modern grain auger of today's farming communities was invented by Peter Pakosh. His grain mover employed a screw-type auger with a minimum of moving parts, a totally new application for this specific use. At Massey Harris (later Massey Ferguson), young Pakosh approached the design department in the 1940s with his auger idea, but was scolded and told that his idea was unimaginable and that once the auger aged and bent that the metal on metal would, according to a head Massey designer, "start fires all across Canada". Pakosh, however, went on to design and build a first prototype auger in 1945, and 8 years later start selling tens of thousands under the 'Versatile' name, making it the standard for modern grain augers.

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