We are looking to upgrade our conveyor tracking systems for our belts and was wondering if anyone has any recommendations.

We are running belts typically in the 55" wide range with our longest running just over 100' long. Material is either cloth, rubber, or teflon coated. Conveyor failure can be costly for us in downtime, so we're looking for a reliable tracking solution. We are also spending a lot of maintenance time on tracking our belts...
Thanks
Jack

Hi Jack I work at a place that has a lot of conveyors and they use Rub Sensors to help this issue and seems to work good.

Regards

Thanks for the reply Jeremy.

We currently use two types. One is the rub sensor with the ceramic roller. But the majority are optical eyes running a two roll tracker with a single pneumatic actuator.

The problem with them is that they only have so much range in tracking the belt. So, if the belt has to be tracked farther than the tracker is capable of, maintenance has to adjust it, which makes it not so "automatic."

Maybe a better question is; how much time do your maintenance guys spend tracking belts? I will run our numbers to compare, but our data collection is in its infancy stage....

I am just a contractor at this site but I think they have monthly or bimonthly PM's set up and I use my Infrared camera on my quarterly mechanical route and look at the sides of the legs and conveyors for hot spots where the belts might be tracking up on the walls.

Regards

Hi. I am a Reliability technician at a cement factory. We have a lot of rubber belt conveyors. In my experience it is best to eliminate the root cause of the tracking problem. However, we do have tracking rollers fitted to all our conveyors and the best design I have found is similar to the one in this link :-
http://www.tru-trac.com/product_editorial.htm
We fit them on the return strand of the belt, one immediately before the gravity take up unit and one before the belt goes around its tail pulley. For the rest of the belt it should be possible to keep it in track with ordinary rollers.
Hope this helps

I agree with camrat. Find the reason the belt is tracking to the side.. Solve it.
Is it being loaded on one side? Is the tail pulley, drive pulley, and head pulley (if center drive) all parallel to each other? Are all of the rollers parallel? Is the tension correct?
I spent a lot of times in the mines, with thousands of feet of rubber conveyor belting from 24" up to 84". Any time it wasn't tracking right, we didn't blame it on the tracking rollers. They are just there for anomolies.

Dave
You know the belt will go toward first point of contact.

Thanks guys! Those are all great replies.

We had a down week two weeks ago, and I did shoot for the root cause on one belt system and had them tear it down to adjust it. (the tail pulley was not square, and we added camber to it)

Maybe a better question, have you guys stumbled on any good training for conveyor engineering?

Jack

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Jack J,

One more question. We run different products on our belts, and this causes the belts to track differently. Anyone ever addressed this type of issue?

We have a belt that runs four different products. The root cause of tracking problems on this belt is usually a problem with the feed on point. How are your feed on points configured? The feed can often push the belt over to one side. Can you post any pics of your machines? Feed points, scrapers etc.

Looked at the feed points and you were right on. Thanks!