RIS ID
21031
Abstract
From transportation of bulk materials in underground and open-cut mines to applications in power stations and processing plants to name but a few, belt conveyors are widely used as an economical continuous conveying method. Most of these industries rely strongly on conveyor transfers to divert material from one conveyor to another at some point in their system. The unfortunate reality is that some companies will be driven by cost minimisation for the short-term rather than planning for the long-term. This will result in bad decisions being made and the incorrect conveyor transfer being installed with flow-on effects such as downtime for modifications or even replacement. There are many facets to the design of a successful transfer chute including minimising product impact, degradation, chute wear, noise, dust and spillage while maximising the material velocity to allow the product to leave the chute at or near the speed of the receiving conveyor. Fully understanding the behaviour of a material is paramount to designing a successful transfer chute. Accurately determining the material discharge and trajectory from the head pulley is the first step in this design process. This paper will focus on the determination of the material trajectory as it leaves the belt conveyor head pulley. This process will also determine the point at which the material leaves the belt, referred to as the discharge angle. There are numerous methods available in the literature focusing on the modelling of material discharge and trajectory, including C.E.M.A. [1,2,3,4,5], M.H.E.A. [6, 7], Booth [8], Golka [9,10], Korzen [11], Goodyear [12] and Dunlop [13]. These methods have been evaluated for both horizontal and inclined belts for a range of belt speeds and pulley diameters to evaluate both low and high-speed conditions. The results of these evaluations have been compared to allow comment on their ease of use, completeness and potential accuracy.
Publication Details
Hastie, DB & Wypych, PW, The prediction of conveyor trajectories, International Materials Handling Conference: Beltcon 14, 2007, p 1-16, South Africa: International Materials Handling.