Hello tominer

I see you are in the quarry industry and have an interest in history. You might therefore be interested to read about Oliver Evans’ Miller’s Guide published in Philadelphia in 1795. This book contains the first reference to the use of belt conveyors in American practice. This takes the topic right back to its roots. You can even buy an original edition if you have the odd $4000.

Your description of a conveyor seems strongly influenced by your quarrying background. There are many other implementations of continuous belt conveyors that have functions other than transport alone. For example, heating, cooling, hand-picking, unloading of your groceries at the supermarket.

However, if we stick to the mineral processing industry, some examples of functions that are contributed to by conveyors are continuous feeding, metal detection, moisture measurement, density measurement, online mineral analysis and continuous weighing.

I hope this provides some food for thought.

Regards ■

Theoretically, I'm sure you could process without conveyors. You would need a huge structure for most normal processing in the quarry setting. Gravity in combination with elaborate chute work and feed hoppers.

The question I would think, is why the contemporary process of processing ore has evlolved to what it is today?

Factors:

1. To process ore it has to be conveyed either by gravity, trucks, loaders, vibration, conveyor, etc...

2. The process has evolved to produce the optimum tonnage at the lowest cost per ton. Conveying product by conveyors cost less than utilizing trucks, loaders, trains, or elaborate chute designs that require steady maintanence with abrasive material.

3. As stated above, conveyors can control the feed rate.

4. Accessability. You plant layout should factor in accessability to change out motors, liners, screens, jaws, cones, etc... Downtime is very costly.

There are many other contributing factors to utilize conveyors, but this will give you a start.

Let us know exactly what you are trying to achieve.

Regards,

Brent Wheeliker

Clemro Western Ltd. ■

Dear Thomas,

As on now, belt conveyor is one of the most important means for handling materials. Presently used material handling systems in the form as they are would not be possible without belt conveyors. Absence of belt conveyors means scrapping of all the existing plants, equipment and facility all over the world. It practically means upside down in material handling field.

People have chosen belt conveyors after centuries of industrial evolution due to its merit / necessity. This is something like saying that can we not manage without wheels? Although wheel is much more important than belt conveyors, but this is just to give an example.

Regards,

Ishwar G Mulani.

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

Email : parimul@pn2.vsnl.net.in

Tel.: 0091 (0)20 5882916 ■