Dear Mr. Alex,

In general, material is not fed on transition zone. The construction of the skirt board at this location will be difficult. Also, if you are using somewhat raised pulley to reduce the transition distance, then you have to be more careful. If you have carefully calculated and chosen the right magnitude and proportion of the transition distance, then you may think about the feeding on part of the transition distance. In principle, there should not be objection for feeding on transition distance at tail end. But in case of head end material will not have sufficient opportunity to pickup the speed and get discharged, which will cause congestion of material at that point (i.e. more thickness of the material layer on the belt due to average slower speed of the material).

As a general rule material is not fed on this zone. This must have been concluded by the application engineers considering certain inconvenience / difficulties.

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 ■

Good morning Alex..

Please have another look at your diagram. The issue here is that your feed chute is seemingly configured incorrectly, as it indicates a vertical drop directly onto the belt.

If you put in a chute which is nicely and corectly angled to direct the material in the direction of motion of the belt. the point of first impact would be approximately at the beginning of the full trough and not in the transition zone.

Also, the width of the opening at the bottom of the chute closest to the tail pulley should be 0.4 x belt width, opening out to 0.6 x belt width at the discharge end.

Since this means that the part of the chute at the transition zone end is at its narrowest, then this will keep spillage to a minimum by default.

Good luck

LSL Tekpro ■

Shouldn't the 2nd carrying idler be located where the trough is fully developed? Don't ignore trivia; trivia is what gets things right. ■

There is an excellent paper on by D.E.Beckley entitled "Belt Conveyor transition geometry", without which I would undoubtedly get it wrong like everyone else.

In the paper, which was written some time ago now, it is shown how to properly calculate transition length, as well as the correct spacing between transition idlers, the required transition idler angles, combined with the correct pack heights to give uniform loading on all idlers in the transition.

I had to re-work the maths in section 4.1.4a of the paper, but after that I use it as my transition bible, and an absolute must for major conveyors.

LSL Tekpro ■