The high cost of overdesigning your belt conveyor
Are you in the market for a new troughed belt conveyor? Maybe you want it to be a heavy-duty unit like your other conveyors so they can all share the same parts inventory. Or, to avoid spending time analyzing your application details, you may just want to specify a conveyor with oversized parts that you know will handle the job. But before you tell your conveyor supplier to "Supersize it," consider whether this will make the conveyor a lot more expensive to build and run than necessary. Using the example of how one plant specified more conveyor than it needed, this article explains how much an overdesigned conveyor can really cost.
Consider how a troughed belt conveyor was recently overdesigned for its application in a glass producer's plant. The producer's plant engineer gave design parameters for a new, relatively small troughed belt conveyor to a belt conveyor supplier. The plant engineer specified that the conveyor would carry glass batch with a 90-lb/ft3 bulk density horizontally for 50 feet at a nominal capacity of 100 t/h. The conveyor would operate 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, but would carry material only 20 percent of the time, running empty for the remaining time.