What Kind Of Material Handling Conveyors Are There?If you have a business where you're doing assembly line work, conveyor belts are the norm. You need many hundreds-of-feet of conveyor belts, and they need to be able to go straight, or take a turn when you come to the end of a line. Material handling conveyors are manufactured by many manufactures, but hytrol conveyors are probably the best out there. Belt conveyor systems tend to be able to handle from 75 - 100 pounds-per-foot and are generally center-driven. They must be heavy-duty so they can carry the weight day-in-and-day-out, year after year. If you have a small manufacturing plant, you know that they tend to be very expensive, so if you're looking for material handling conveyors, you'll want to get a used conveyor instead of a new one. When you are looking at what kind of conveyor you might want, there are band conveyors, and there are gravity roller conveyors. Roller conveyors use ball-bearing-lubricated rollers can transfer heavier materials than a belt conveyer might; but there are gaps in-between the rollers so you can't transport anything that's small and doesn't have a flat bottom with rollers. Rollers are generally used to transfer boxes from one place to the other. Nestaflex and Bestflex are two of the best manufactures of flexible conveyors. They're good in shipping departments and other high-traffic areas. Since they have castors on their sides, they can be shaped into curves. After you're done with it, you can fold it up and store it. Whenever you need either temporary work from the conveyor, or if you need to reconfigure the way the conveyor goes quite often, then a flexible system might be what you're interested in. There are also telescoping conveyors. These go inside the back of a trailer truck which will allow the packages to easily be loaded and unloaded. Once the loading has been finished, it's easy to just telescope it back out again and it's then ready for the next truck. Material handling conveyors, then, can either be firmly planted in one area or they can be flexible and moveable. A telescoping one can be used to put things into the trucks. Pneumatic conveyors are good for the transport of bulk materials. K-Tron Premier is one who deals with pneumatic conveying systems. These are good, sanitary, conveying systems that are used in the food, packaging, chemical and pharmaceutical industries. They're made of dust-free stainless steel or mild steel vacuum systems. A vacuum conveying system has four main parts. There's the pickup nozzle, the conveying line, the vacuum filter/receiver and the vacuum generator. The negative pressure is generated in the conveying line along with the vacuum filter/receiver. You can choose different kinds of vacuum generators such as fan, vacuum pump or displacement blower. Each of these will determine what kind of maximum negative pressure you'll be able to generate. As it operates, the material you wish to convey is placed through the conveying line and it goes into the vacuum filter/receiver. The material then drops through gravity into the hopper, where it ends up in the vacuum filter/receiver. The air that conveyed it is then divided from the material that passed through the filter media. When there's a continuous discharge of material that's coming from the vacuum filter/receiver, you need a rotary airlock or a gate lock that maintains the vacuum pressure at a proper level. So, if you're looking for material handling conveyors, there are many choices to be made, such as when you need an incline conveyor. |