Can be done. Not as sharp as you plot. Need to pay for engineering it. ■

Hi there Mr Patel..

It is not the number of horizontal curves you have in one conveyor that should concern you, it is the size of the radii you can fit in, and how you go about calculating the idler goemetry in the curves. (Our dual carry conveyor, which swopped the top and bottom strands over, top to bottom, and bottom to top in 198m, had 10 curves compounded together, and worked perfectly)

Careful though.., there are some commercially available conveyor design programmes about these days, which supposedly include the "design" of the horizontal curves, but quite frankly, they are inadequate for the job... So beware.. you have been warned!

(I visited a site a week month ago, where they had a curved conveyor where the belt climbs right out of the trough when empty. They put in guide rollers, and it climbs up these too! I will have to completely re-design the idler geometry for them if there is any chance of fixing their curve)

If you give an indication of the configuration of the conveyor you are looking for, I can indicate if it will be do-able.

Cheers

LSL Tekpro ■

Horizontal curves are possible. They are determined for the requirement but also for their suitability. I often say that horizontal curve radius is self dictating. In a sense we only analyze them but there are some things that we can do to control tension (using intermediate drives). For the capacity requirements, once we determine the path, trough configuration, etc, then we must analyze the extremes of the tensions at each point along the profile. At each point we calculate belt wander for the tension and material load changes (from empty to design load) the vector sum of the radial load due to tension and the vertical gravity loads (belt and material) will determine the magnitude and direction of the load vector. We must choose an idler bank angle that is best for the aggregate of the changing vector and limits belt wander to an acceptable range. There is not a limit in the number of curves they just have to work for the min/max tension range.

Joe Dos Santos ■