Your product pallet pitch and unit mass per pallet cannot exceed the chain conveyor rated tension, including its safety factor and which includes all mechanical drag losses and gravity or lifting forces to elevate product. So, how many units are to be conveyed between load and removal points in a specified time and what are the mixes of masses of these units.

The drag and elevation losses, for the given chain speed, must have a motor that can conveyor the moving drag and can accelerate the mass.

We cannot see how the chain is supported to assess a reasonable drag value -- is it sliding on supports or rolling, what type of bearing and seals are used, how is transverse alignment, controlled ,........ ?

From these above premises, you can back-engineer the conveyors capacity which will not exceed a selected motor and chain strength limits, which may already be specified.

The equation for drag and lift power is:

kW = [(drag + lifting force) x chain velocity] / chain drive efficiency

If the above is still confusing, hire a professional to render assistance. ■

An accumulating conveyor does encounter the resistances to motion twice, as you seem to suspect.

Drag per unit roller can be calculated from any bearing manufacturer's handbook. This conveyor is nice & clean so you can use their values with complete safety. That is the only engineering quantification required, the rest is a bit of arithmetic.

Add the drag, calculated from the bearing catalogue, from the laden rollers, empty or loaded pallets, to the drag from the hauling chain rollers. There is also different drag between a laden hauling chain roller & an empty one.

It is then a process of equating the sum of the laden & unladen roller drag to the available traction from the conveyor drive; not forgetting the return rollers on the underside.

Don't forget that the instantaneous placing forces are at least twice the final mass on the pallet.

Build up a spreadsheet so that you can take account of variations in conveyor length, chain pitch, pallet length & pallet load for reference in future installations. Presumably there is no incline, lift, for the pallets to roll back down. Otherwise you'd convey nowt nowhere. ■

I forgot to ask what happened to the printer missing from a pallet on the adjacent conveyor? ■