Automated conveyors and AS/RS implementations can increase the performance of your warehouse operations, enhance warehouse safety and substantially reduce employee costs.

Today's conveyor systems can transport everything from lightweight cartons to heavy pallets within your facility and they are a fundamental component of modern material handling design.

Conveyor systems fall into three different divisions for the vast majority of material handling operations:

• Powered roller or belt conveyors (for carton handling).
• Powered roller or chain systems (for pallet handling).
• Non-powered systems

Powered Package Handling Roller or Belt Conveyors

Powered belt or roller conveyor systems are frequently used for less bulky pieces like cartons and packages.

Conveyor belts are mostly employed for moving packages along a line, while rollers are used for collecting products in specific areas along the line.

Belt Conveyors

Used since the beginning of the 20th Century, belt conveyors are an indispensable piece of many material handling systems. Not as costly as roller options and oftentimes more appropriate for specific functions like transporting lighter weight items, belt systems have a place in most material handling configurations.

Belt conveyors employ a long, looped belt that is positioned on the top of a metal slider belt substructure or an array of non-powered rollers. A motor drives a pulley that turns the belt and advances objects down the conveyor line.

Belts are made of a variety of materials and surfaces according to the function and role of the conveyor. For example, a conveyor belt surface might be un-ridged in areas where cartons need to glide off the line and may have a gripping texture on segments where goods must be moved up inclines.

Roller Conveyors

While belt conveyors still have a place in most operations, newer roller systems feature a host of advantages in many modern material handling uses.

Most importantly, roller systems can allow for collection of objects on the line where belt configurations can not. This is an important contrast because there are countless scenarios where objects must slow down and accumulate in material handling designs. Accumulation processes are often used when items must be paused before being forwarded to sorters or palletizers.

Advanced roller systems also have the capability to track objects on the line and apply zero pressure accumulation, meaning none of the accumulating objects come into contact as they slow down and come to stop.

Roller conveyors are made up of numerous cylindrical rollers that are usually powered in one of these ways:.

• Line-shaft conveyors: in a line shaft conveyor, a long steel shaft runs beneath the rollers perpendicular to them and is connected to each cylinder with flexible O-rings. A drive mechanism rotates the shaft, and thereby rotates the rollers via the attached O-rings. Line-shaft conveyors are the most cost efficient of all roller setups, but they can also demand the most maintenance because the O-ring connectors between the rollers and the shaft tend to need adjustment and sometimes break.
• Belt-driven roller conveyors: As you would surmise from the name, belt-driven roller conveyors are driven by a belt that lies underneath the roller platform. A motor propels the belt, which propels the cylinders.
• MDR conveyors: Motorized roller conveyors, frequently called motor-driven roller (MDR) conveyors, are configured in segments where one cylinder from each section is propelled by it's own drive mechanism. That individual powered roller is joined to the others in that segment via flexible O-rings, and therefore powers all the rollers in the segment. Powered segments are placed in succession to configure the conveyor line.
  Motorized roller conveyors are known for their energy efficiency because: a.) they usually run on 24V direct current motors and b.) these electric motors can be configured to engage only when an object is detected on the rollers, and as a result they are inactive most of the time.
  Although MDR conveyors are more expensive than belt drive and line-shaft systems, energy expenses and maintenance expenses are typically much lower than the other types of conveyors.
• Segmented belt conveyor: the principle of motor driven roller conveyors ultimately inspired the development of segmented belt conveyors. Similar to MDR conveyors, segmented belts function independently and offer several of the same advantages of MDRs, including accumulation potential.

Powered Pallet Handling Conveyors

Powered pallet-handling conveyors are quite often coupled with automatic palletizers and AS/RS setups. Pallet handling conveyors can usually deal with loads of up to 2 tons and operate at a far slower pace than carton handling systems, sometimes at speeds as low as four pallets per minute.

Pallet-handling conveyors come in two types: roller conveyors and chain conveyors.

• Pallet-handling chain conveyor: perhaps the most rudimentary of all conveyor methods, pallets on a chain conveyor line are positioned on top of segments of heavy duty chain. A drive mechanism advances the chain segments which consequently advance the pallets along the line.
• Pallet-handling roller conveyor: comparable to motor driven roller conveyors, pallet handling roller configurations use larger rollers and heavy duty chains to join the motorized roller to the rest of the rollers in a conveyor section.

Non-Powered Conveyors

Roller or skatewheel systems are the most prevalent types of non-powered conveyors used in material handling. These types of systems use inertia and gravity to move smaller products though pick modules, warehouses, automated sorters, workstations, loading docks and package sorting areas.

Skatewheel systems are made up of numerous seperate wheels and need very little power to sustain the inertia of objects as they move down a conveyor line. On the whole, they propel products faster than non-powered roller systems and they have more adaptability when it comes to configuration. Considering they're standalone wheels instead of a belt, they may be applied in curvilinear sections of a conveyor system.

In general non-powered roller configurations are not as expensive as skatewheel conveyor configurations. They are frequently utilized for pick modules, workstations, and other sectors where it's beneficial to maintain a flat surface to perform tasks. Roller conveyors are also used to decelerate items that originate from higher speed systems like sorters so that workers can keep pace with conveyor output.

Non-powered skatewheel and roller systems have a distinct liability compared to powered conveyors: by employing gravity and inertia to move materials you lose the ability to control the force applied to those items. Put another way, you have very little control of the speed and inertia of materials on your conveyor line.

Conveyor System Engineering In Orange County

If you 'd like a complete evaluation of conveyor system possibilities for your storage facility, DC or other material handling operation, you can speak with an expert at Raymond West by calling (714) 790-9300.

 

Service Area: Anaheim, Costa Mesa, Fullerton, Garden Grove, Orange, Santa Ana, Tustin Phone: (714) 790-9300