We are designing a 27 km OLC in Africa. The client specifies that all idler rollers to be plastic coated or all plastic. There are three providers of the rolls in Africa. The client has a preference and has been using them exclusively for more than one year.

There are a number of advantages:

1. Lighter thereby aiding maintenance

2. Lowere power by reducing interface friction (rubber squirm) between belt and roller

3. Lowers noise

4. Improves eccentricity tolerance to < 0.5 TIR

5. Improves corrosion resistance

We are hoping to trial a number of designs to quantify the rolling resistance loss on point 2. ■

Originally Posted by RyanN

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Thank you Mr. Nordell for those points of advantage. Are there any factors involved with the use of these idler rollers that required you to either reach a compromise, e.g. sacrifice durability for the reduced interference friction/maintenance friendly weight?

Are you using the plastic coated idler rollers or the completely plastic rollers? and why?

Ryan

Ryan,

The photo below was a HDPE roller on a coal conveyor. There could be many reasons for the roller as seen in this condition (wrong application, wrong materials etc etc) but its something you should be aware of.

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I am distributing the EU-Rollers mainly in Scandinavia and to my understanding Mega-Roller was developed by the same person, Gyula Romana, who now runs the EU-Roller factory in Hungary.

Based on the discussion with various customers in Scandinavia the plastic rollers, like on the photos earlier on this thread, are kind of lighter duty solutions.

There is no steel pipe inside to carry the loads and often recycled material is used, which makes it hard to predict the performance of the HDPE sleeve. This has partially contributed to the not always so good image of the "plastic" rollers

Also on some of the arrangements the end-cap design allows water to penetrate between the face and cap. In winter the freezing water expands and pops the caps out.

The Supreme roller from Rulmeca for example is already a more developed solution also with a steel pipe. There the bearing housing arrangement is a bit different and the rear sealing is still missing and the sealing is a typical labyrinth sealing in comparison to the 4xlip of the EU-Rollers.

The sleeve thicknesses are certainly also an issue. Some of the rollers are coated of have a thin HDPE layer. On the EU-Rollers the sleeve thickness are from the 14mm of the 127mm dia rollers to 27mm on the 194mm dia rollers. As a mechanical engineer plastic and cold conditions are always causing some headache, but I have tested them at -30C with a sledge hammer and nothing happens, so that is not an issue...except that the impact resistance seems to be a very good.

So far I have not found an ATEX classified roller and the fire resistance is often a problem, but I think that will be solved after a while still.

For more information on the EU-Rollers, please check www.eu-roller.com, www.eu-rollerapi.com or drop me an email at info@sysi.fi

Regards,

Petteri ■