Question about ore conveyor design loads

[atrizzy]

Hi all,

I'm trying to rationalize a reasonable critical loading condition for a conveyor. What I'm envisioning is a condition where a portion of the conveyor gets clogged up and forces a mound of material to pile up at the clogging point and spill over the sides onto the adjacent walkways.

To those of you who design these things regularly: Is this a common practice? While there may be controls in place to prevent this sort of occurrence, failures happen. How do you folks regularly determine what kind of 'upset' load is credible and what kind is not?

 

[ldeem]

A couple of things to consider.

Design for maximum material weight on the belt - not the design capacity of the conveyor. CEMA will give you cross-sectional area for belt width and troughing angle.

It is typical to design for plugged chutes (which will happen during the life cycle). I am not sure the configuration in your case but assume the chute fills up and any rock boxes/chutes spill over.

Pay attention to drive area deflections (drive to drive pulley especially). Also any torsional loading if you have a heavy drive on one side of a frame.

Make sure you have accurate loads for belt pulls, CWT sizes etc. Operators will adjust CWT size so its good to be conservative here. On belt pulls make sure you consider tension at startup under full load. The startup time has a big impact here.

Finally, if this is outside or any a high corrosion area consider allowing some safety factor for future section loss. Also if you can design your details such that they don't trap material it will aid in improving the structures life.

There's more to consider but these are the motre conveyor specfic ones that jump out to me.

 

[atrizzy]

Thanks Ideem, I appreciate the advice.

Funny you mention section loss. That's exactly the issue I'm addressing in this study and whoever designed this thing specified some pretty slender local-buckling-governed sections that are halfway eaten up...