A screw conveyor is a machine that uses rotating helical screw blades called "flighting" affixed to a central shaft and supported at either end by bearings.
This assembly can be mounted within a ‘U’ trough, ‘V’ trough or a Tube. They are used in many bulk handling industries. A variation on this is a heavy duty "shaftless spiral", supported and driven at one end and free at the other, which runs on a specially designed wear plate or wear bars.
Screw conveyors can be used horizontally or at an incline as an efficient way to move semi-solid materials, including cement, aggregates, cereal grains, wood chips/pellets, animal feed, boiler ash, bone meal, municipal waste, and many, many others. Inclines are up to 45 degrees although as the angle of inclination increases, the capacity of a given unit rapidly decreases. In certain applications they can be vertical. The rate of volume throughput is proportional to the rotation speed of the shaft.
Feed rates can be controlled by varying the rotational speed of the shaft to deliver a measured quantity of material into a process. The rotating part of the conveyor is sometimes simply called an auger.