Lightweight nylon elevator buckets hang in there
When Halliburton Services wanted to prevent its elevator buckets from pulling out their rivets, the company switched to lightweight nylon buckets attached to the belt with bolts.
An oil-field services installation of Halliburton Services, a division of Halliburton Co., in Bakersfield, Calif., receives sand by bulk railcar. The room-temperature sand gravity loads onto an underground belt conveyor, which dumps the sand into a chute that connects to a 60-foot-tall bucket elevator. The bucket elevator's multi-ply rubber belt and attached buckets move the sand through a metal enclosure and up to a metal downspout, where the buckets discharge 3,100 pounds of sand an hour. The downspout empties the sand into a piping system leading to storage tanks or to trucks, which haul the sand to oil fields serviced by Halliburton.