Hello,

Looking at the information given by you, it seems a regular conveyor is mounted on a pivot so that it can be swivelled horizontally. Is it so? Where is the location of pivot, whether at the ends or at the centre? Kindly provide more information. Please also give mention the functional requirement of the conveyor, whether it is for stacking or reclaiming or certain testing.

Regards,

Ishwar G Mulani.

Author of Book : Engineering Science and Application Design for Belt Conveyors.

Author of Book : Belt Feeder Design and Hopper Bin Silo

Advisor / Consultant for Bulk Material Handling System & Issues.

Email : parimul@pn2.vsnl.net.in

Tel.: 0091 (0)20 25882916 ■

DEAR SIR,

WHAT IS THE LENGTH OF CONVEYOR AND MATERIAL TO BE HANDLED AND ITS CAPACITY ?

THANKS ■

Hello, How are Ye,

Slewing conveyors are easy enough. The conveyor is balanced over a slew ring, Rothe Erde, (a lovely village near Aachen) which may or may not incorporate a ring gear for transmitting the rotation. It matters not where the pivot is so long as the gravity is balanced & the inertia is manageable from acceleration & braking considerations.

Power used to be supplied through slip rings but modern cable chains, Igus, (somewhere else in vorsprung der technik but with a UK/Eireann office) are much better.

Feeding a slewing conveyor involves a bit of geometry if there is a transition from square to round just upstream from the bottom chute, before the skirt plates. If you leave the chutes square you have to constrict the upstream to enter the receiving chute & you have a big dust sealing problem; so we usually suffer the transition.

Try to balance the feed impact within the slew ring; its even better if you can resolve the force onto the intersection of the belt line & the slew axis. ■

Making such a belt reversible really adds to your problems. If the belt can rotate 360º, why does it need to be reversible? The nearest standard design I've seen is for rotary stacker-reclaimers. I had the
of coming up with a new design for the center pivot of the reclaimer portion of one some years back. Although you will probably have to design the pivoting mechanism and structure yourself, those shouldn't prove to be very difficult for a talented engineer.

The one area that will require careful thought is the loading of the belt to avoid eccentric loading and associated equipment damage and spillage. As a previous poster noted, you will need to design a square-to-round transition concentric with the pivot point of your conveyor through which your material must pass. I did a major redesign of this area on the one refered to above as it had major spillage and alignment problems due to poor design from the manufacturer and awful, wet operating conditions. The redesign was very successful but would be too extensive to fully describe in this forum. It essentially started with a stationary square rockbox with a central hole protected by a donut shaped wear bar. Below the rock box was a short stationary vertical circular chute which discharged into a larger diameter concentric chute that rotated with the conveyor. Since the falling material enters the rotating chute from any side, I continued the circular chute with an immediate miter in the direction of the belt travel at an angle of about 60º with the horizontal. The circular shape of the chute was continued to the belt loading point to centralize the material on the belt. To further ensure central loading of the belt, I also included a V-notched loading plate. If you'd like, I could make some sketches of what I did and send them along to you.■