College of Mining, NUST MISIS, Moscow, Russia:

V. I. Galkin, Professor, Doctor of Engineering Sciences, Vgalkin07@rambler.ru

Recently pipe conveyor belts enjoy widening application owing to innovative design concepts. The most promising design solutions include elongation of belts to a few tens of kilometers using intermediate drives; increase of permissible angle of belts to 460 with innovative manufacturing technologies of conveyor belts. Original R&D projects concerned with operation of such-design pipe conveyor belts are reviewed. An emphasis is laid on the research accomplished by the consortium of Contitech, Siemens and ThyssenKrupp, Germany, to determine efficient range of use of the Chevron-Megapipe belt with the rubbed carrying side (top) cover to prevent rolling-down of load, which allows increasing the belt angle to 460. The belt was tested on a special bench at the varied parameters of the belt occupancy with load, chevron profile height, belt angle, dynamic effect on conveyor rollers as a function of size and shape of ore. With regard to the test results, the calculations were performed for a high angle pipe conveyor belt installed at an angle of 350 and equipped with a steel cord rubber belt of the type of St5000–Chevron-Megapipe 3000 mm wide, to convey copper ore along the pit wall from a depth of 390 m. The belt capacity was 5000 t/h at the belt speed of 4.19 m/s. The tests of the lateral rigidity of belts with and without chevron profile on a special bench show that chevron profile 50 mm high on the top cover of St5000 has almost no influence on the lateral rigidity of the belt. Siemens designed special conveyor drive Directdrive to transmit torque directly (without a gear assembly) from the drive rotor to the driving drum with diameter of 1800 mm. The torque is transmitted to the driving drum shaft from a single drive with capacity of 8000 kW.

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