Why would you go to the expense of dual drives on a 37 kW drive?

You need to substations, MCC, yada yada, instruments, lights, music, yada, yada. Two are twice as unreliable as one. There is no money to be saved. What is the advantage? ■

Dear Steve,

I do understand your point in principle. However, I fail to see the practical application when you reduce it to numbers and make the system more comlex. Have you made the numbers analysis? Could you share the data with the forum?

In answer to your first posting, of placement of dual drives at the ends and not the middle, is a practical one. It is axiomatic to eliminate pulleys whenever possible. With end driven pulleys you do not introduce additional pulleys.

The design can be executed with one drive or two drives, operated with reverse polarity on one motor or, as you wish, with two drives with one operational or two operational. The conveyor is not sufficiently complex to warrant duplicity in its design. The return on investment is not there. Reliability will suffer. KISS. ■

The situation you are describing is not uncommon for shorter belts like reversible shuttles, say up to 30-40m. In these cases there is a single drive at one end and the other end is a screw takeup which is just tightened to provide enough slack side tension on the top side when driving through the return run.

On a longer belt like yours, you will need an automatic takeup, gravity, hydraulic, winch or whatever as you will have more belt to draw up when in "reverse", ie driving thorugh the return run. You are fortunate that your belt is mostly horizontal so you won't get into regenerative conditions.

If your takeup is hydraulic or winch and you want to get really sophisticated you could have two tension settings to correspond to forward and reverse requirements. ■

We built our own conveyor that is 1/2 mile long with an incline at one end. Driven by one motor (wrap drive) and has a hyd. auto take up system. If you have the room to use a wrap drive at your inclined end also use the wrap as you take up. We can run up to 3000MT/HR. ■

Hi Steve

We did one like this and simply reversed the single drive to operate in opposite direction.

I like Gravity take-ups as they are simple ...Larry says KISS (which is a bit worrying as it is Saint Valentines day today)

All you do is set the take-up for high tension values, which for your duty is pretty much equal to low tension on larger conveyors

Regards

LSL Tekpro ■

Got you worried? You shoud know the KISS is for you (Pun). ■

Thanks for the KISS offer Larry...

But I would rather stay faithful to Meg Ryan if that's OK, even if she is rapidly going downhill at present..

LSL Tekpro ■