Damp fine products will tend to adhere to contact surfaces, particularly if impacted by the receipt of a flow trajectory or gravity drop. Various forms of approach may be made that may be applied individually or in combination, but to best advise a solution it is necessary to have the full particulars of the application. Whilst some care is needed to interpret measured bulk material property values, they are useful in quantifying the nature of the phenomenon and, in many cases, indicating the most suitable contact surface for release and/or wear properties. Chutes notoriously receive inadequate design attention, probably because they are of relatively low capital cost and flow is taken for granted. There is a natural in-built resistance to spending money on investigating the potential performance of a piece of sheet metal, that is, until the cost of it not working becomes painful.

Flow through chutes is one aspect of belt conveyor performance that I will be addressing at an up-coming Seminar at the I.Mech.E in London on ‘Better Belt Conveying’ on 5th Oct. 2005. If you care to send a drawing of the arrangement and advise details of flow rate to lyn@ajax.co.uk, I will be pleased to review and make some suggestions. ■

Try the WEBA High Tech Transfers by M&J Engineering of South Africa. We have installed many successful WEBA chutes in the USA.

Please visit the M&J web site.

http://www.mjeng.co.za

Joseph A. Dos Santos ■