Cheap Enough To Work.
Placing the vibrating plate under the conveyor is going to cause you more spillage than before, shake the bejabers out of the conveyor frame while causing the belt to wear out very quickly. The belt would slip in empathy with the longitudinal vibration and slip laterally, without elaborate tracking.
The real way is to sit a vibrating feeder just above the belt. Enough to give half a date clearance, with a slow decline. This feeder would be a simple flat plate with sharply upturned sidewalls. It could be light enough to be suspended from chains and 'D' shackles when required. Dates are probably not abrasive and a stainless plate of 5mm will last you and your grandchildren' lifetime. You can bolt the vibro-motor directly atop the plate if you make it long enough.
Choice of amplitude will be your main concern and will probably be about half a date or just less. Frequency dictates throughput and so you will need a VSD on the vibro-motor: which you had anyway. ■
John Gateley johngateley@hotmail.com www.the-credible-bulk.com
Just To Be Clear
Ok,
I am fairly sure that I understand what you are describing. I did a quick sketch to see if I have everything how you described. Please let me know if I misunderstood.
Attachments
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Almost
You need to spread the chains to make the assembly more stable.
Reduce the drop onto the feeder plate so that dates don't bounce off sideways. ■
John Gateley johngateley@hotmail.com www.the-credible-bulk.com
Spreader Bar & Zig Zag Chute
Thanks John,
I will add a spreader bar to the frame of the elevator to spread out the support chains and for the vertical chute, I was planning on doing a zig-zag design or switchbacks to slow the product down as it is falling from the "z" elevator to the vibratory chute. ■
Vibration Table Under Conveyor Belt
Vibration Table Under Conveyor Belt To Level Commodity
Hi,
This is my first time posting in the forum and I may not have posted in the right area, so please feel free to redirect me.
I work for a food processing company that mainly deals with dried fruits and nuts. One of my recent undertakings is to develop a better handling method for loading the conveyor belts to our machines. We recently acquired a "z" elevator that was originally going to be for a customer to move dried dates but they decided they would rather use their own elevator after poor loading performance (ie. the dates were falling off and causing issues at the speeds necessary to meet their throughput). We handle a variety of dried fruits and need a better way to load them onto out oven belts than by hand, which is how we do it now. We would like to use the elevator, which dumps at about 7', along with a chute to load commodity onto our belts, at about 4'. Then we would like to level the commodity, which is where I think the vibrating table could come in.
My idea is to place a vibrating plate under the belt at the point where the commodity lands to aid it in leveling before entering the oven. I know that there are two approaches to vibration: high amplitude, low frequency and high frequency, low amplitude. If I understand them correctly I would want high frequency, low amplitude. We have used rollers to level our dried commodities but the stickier dried fruits have a tendency to build up on the roller and I worry that we would get inconsistent densities which would greatly affect our process. Scrapers are especially useless and have a tendency to plow in our experience.
I'm open to other ideas and look forward to any comments. ■