Cushion Belt Conveyor Mechanism And Application

Air-cushion conveyer is a new type uninterrupted transfer equipment, utilizing spiral-slot in the air chamber as a replacement for bracket. The cushion supports the convey belt, converting slide friction between the belt and the bracket into slide friction between the belt and the cushion. It features stable running, low power consumption, easy maintenance, etc.Nonetheless this kind of cushion-shape machine has been widely used, such theories as air layer formation, spiral-slot style, pores arrangement requires further analysis and research since the machines are only manufactured based on common, design and test so far and many relations among the data have been fixed yet. And a lot of quality problems have been reported in over 10 years application both nation-wide and worldwide, like insufficient convey efficiency, friction between convey belt and the slot, causing severe damages of the operator. And all these problems just arose out of unreasonable data setting. In this case, further mechanism and application research becomes crucially important.The article below deals with the mechanism research of this kind of machine, describing the structure and principle; theoretically analyzing the data to derive formula; tentatively proposing theory of radial flow between parallel plates for future design; pores arrangement, i.e., longitudinal pores are equally spaced, horizontal pores bore size is preferred unequal and rows distance can be either equal or not but generally smaller than pores distance, and rows shall be odd numbers and are arranged symmetrical from the center row and bore size reduces gradually from the center row. The arrangement shall also take transfer efficiency, conveyingmaterial features, conveying speed, surrounding environment, etc. into consideration. Plus, application research has also been made, key blower data have been designed by computed optimization, spiral-slot style is well chosen. Some practical application examples illustrate the air-cushion conveyer designed by myself, which has been in service in Dalian Dayaowan Scattered Provision Project.