Bucket elevator design is not complex.

Get yourself an elevator bucket catalogue and use a calculator.

If you go to

http://www.go4b.co.uk/uk/elevatorQuestionnaire.asp

they will design the elevator and quote the parts for you,

or

http://www.jh.nl/en/bulkconveyors/be...sprogramma.htm

has a design program ■

What about it??

Surely you don't need software to design such a simple thing as an elevator headshaft??

It is such a basic engineering thing, just paper and a calculator is all that's needed. A line is the shaft, position the loads and supports, calculate the bending moments and twisting moments, calculate the critical shaft diameters. Learnt that on day release to college when I started work. ■

Interesting, in the case of a bucket elevator I suppose you have to decide if the size of the project warrants the cost of the software. Anyway, it's always good to understand how to do a calculation rather than just feed numbers into a program. ■

When you get old you forget what threads you have contributed to in the past!

One final point, if the elevator is a chain & bucket rather than a belt & bucket, then the head shaft can accept a greater amount of deflection. ■

The principles could be applied to bucket elevators, if you understood what values to enter and which to leave out, but I don't think it could cope with a motor, v-belt drive, shaft mounted gearbox arrangement though.

But there are some big buckets around with shaft mounted motor/fluid coupling/gearbox arrangements, done a few ourselves. ■