I have built just such a conveyor at an incinerator in the US about 15 years ago. If my memory is correct, we used a 48" wide, 35 degree troughed 3 ply belt with 3/16 top cover. We got everything from car parts to small refrigerators to bowling balls on the belt. Incline was about 12 degrees with a curve to horizontal at the discharge, length was about 80 feet horizontal.

The problem will not be impact, it will be cutting. Eventually you will get a shredded piece of steel, in just the right orientation, jam in the skirts, or between the magnet & the head pulley and it will tear out a chunk of belt or become a belt slitter. The plant stocked a spare belt on a reeling stand near the conveyor. The belt seemed to last a year or more unless something catastrophic happened.

Avoid impact beds, they just trap sharp material & damage the back side of the belt. Use good rubber tread impacts spaced close together. We have one load point with about a 4ft drop, the other with an 8 ft drop which we were able to lessen the impact by dropping onto the sloping back plate of the skirts.

While some more expensive materials such as urethanes may wear longer, urethane creates a much more spectacular fire if you get some unquenched material on the belt. Consider the belt to be a consumable. ■

Please contact Mr Mark Gladwin +44 779 134 9007 (or write an SMS on the same number).

He can solve your problem based on multi steelcord layers rubber belts.

This has been implemented succesfully in many Scrap Metal facilities. The most challenging being the Oshawa/Whitby (Ontario) unit for used-cars.

Also take into account the possible presence of oil in scrap parts, which may require some % of Nitrile in the compound.

But Mr Gladwin knows it all and can also offer the splicing. (allways tricky with steelcord and Nitrile...) ■

While steelcord would offer some advantages against slitting and maybe impact, it is still the covers which will suffer most, and I'm not sure the price adder for steelcord and its splice is worth it when what we saw most of the time was the covers being gradually gnawed away or marred by a hot spot. Money would probably be better spent on thicker covers.

The installation referenced in Whitby Ontario is likely the Gerdau steel plant which is a different type of material. That material is shredded steel, incinerator scrap metal is just stuff that got put in the garbage and didn't get burned and is not usually as sharp edged unless you have a very aggressive grapple operator.

We only ever saw one catastrophic belt slitting incident and that was because shortly after startup, the magnet was set close enough to the head pulley that a partially collapsed 45 gallon drum got trapped between in just the right orientation. A height switch over the belt and some magnet repositioning solved the rest. ■