Three decades of experience in material handling and plant logistics in all the industrial sectors
Would you drive a track race car on a road full of potholes? That’s pretty much what is happening when your high-quality packaging machines are connected with poorly designed conveyor lines. In 40 years in the conveyor business we have seen this happening more often that we would like. For a company like M.H. Material Handling this is painful, considering the passion we put in giving the best possible value to our customers.
Should we compare a packaging line to a living organism, conveyors are like the nervous system AND the circulatory system at the same time. They deliver the product to feed the machines off course, that would be the blood which powers the organs, but the way they do deliver these products is like the signals that the body receives from the neural system. A badly delivered signal to one organ can jeopardize the whole body.
As a company we are fully aware that the technology beneath conveyors is not rocket science, but at the same time the amount of “know how” needed to correctly design an efficient conveyor line is huge and achieve it takes long years of experience on the job. For this reason we decided to launch in the next months an informative programme to share knowledge and awareness on the “conveyor culture”.
The contents will be available on all our Social Network’s pages under the brand of ConveyorU. In time all the main topics will be covered: speed, side guides, conveyor to conveyor passages, type of chain or belt selection, hygienic design, safety issues, product flow.Feeling it’s not enough di discuss only the basic knowledge, we will get into the design of our special machines: mergers, dividers, buffering systems; all these units will be analysed and explained in order to allow a correct and aware selection, focusing on efficiency and cost effectiveness.
The whole campaign will be presented like a TV Show with Series and Episodes to identify the progression of topics. It will have basic, advanced and expert segmentations, in order to be useful to the widest range of individuals as possible, from the line operator to the project manager.
It will be available in different forms: slide show, text or video, to allow anyone to consume the contents in the way they find most convenient. Just go on our company’s pages, M.H. Material Handling, on social networks, look for our logo or for the hashtag #ConveyorU and search for the topic you would like to be informed of. Feel free to drop us a message if there are specific arguments you would like to see covered.
Let’s give a glimpse of what ConveyorU will be introducing the first topic of the basic level: Nominal Speed of the Conveyor.
The Nominal Speed is the one at which a conveyor must be set in order to have all the products on it touching each other, like a train’s wagons. If we call L the length of a rectangular product or D the diameter of a circular one it’s very easy to calculate the nominal speed:
Vn=(L×P)/1000
Where P is the productivity rate expressed in products per minute. The result will be a speed in meters per minute, typical unit of conveyor people! This is the MINIMUM speed required to achieve the productivity rate without having products overlapping. In an ideal world they would travel on the conveyor without any gap between each other, but even without touching.
Obviously due to friction, layout of the conveyor and other external factors the reality is always different, that is the reason, or at least one of the reasons, why the design speed is always higher than the nominal one. The typical situation is to set a design speed of 1,5 to 2 times the nominal speed. The gap between the products, if the pace is regular which is not always the case, is between halt to the full length of the products, usually enough to be able to have sensors discern one product from the other and devices to operate on them.
