Conveyors in Industry
- Building site and rubble/aggregates
- Warehouse and logistics
- Waste Recycling
- Food Industry
- Industry, Manufacturing and processing
About conveyors
- Types of Conveyors
- Belts and belting
- Control Panels and PLC's
- Recent Examples
- Jaguar Bumber conveyor
- Overhead laundry sorter
- Sand and aggregates
- Waste and recycling
- Curves and bends
- Drag Conveyors
- Money Conveyor
- Hairpin bend
Other Information
Conveyor of the Month
February 2008
Platters at the low-level loading end of the track
The track rises up past the scanner and towards the sortation zone
The sortation zone with pneumatic tipping rods that dump the garments to the baskets waiting below
"The Merry-go-Round"
The customer cleans a variety of industrial materials, from lightweight overalls to heavy-duty floor matting. The requirement was for a sorting machine that could read the 'chips' built into the fabrics, and dump them into different wheeled baskets accordingly.
Staff needed to be able to freely access the wheeled baskets, removing them when full and replacing them with empty ones. To make matters even more interesting the machine had to fit into a very restricted space.
Our solution was an overhead chain conveyor. The system has a number of "platters" hanging from an overhead drive track. At one end of the machine the overhead track descends to waist levle, allowing staff to place garments, matts etc onto the platters as they move past.
The track then climbs upwards above head-height towards the sortation zone. Staff place wheeled baskets in one of three specific areas under this zone, based on floor markings.
The garments are scanned and - based on the product code - dumped into one or other of the different baskets by a pneumatic tilt-rod. A fourth basket on the 'return' leg is used to capture any 'reject' products - e.g. where no chip is present, or the chip could not be read.
The system is variable-speed to allow for different weights of garments (some are easier/faster to load than others). The drive track also features a slipping clutch to ensure that staff could not be injured if they walked 'into' the machine, or got themselves stuck on a platter. The entire drive will 'slip' with firm hand-pressure on any of the platters.
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