Analysing the vibrating conveyor

Several possible vibrating conveyor designs—the “sealskin” conveyor, the “jerk” conveyor, the conveyor with inclined motion and the conveyor with out-of-phase motion—are first discussed and their relative performances are compared. The most promising (and most widely employed) design, namely the conveyor with inclined motion, is then analysed in detail. The analysis is in all cases limited to conveyors with a horizontal track and with vertical track accelerations not exceeding g, the gravitational constant. Since the analytical performance prediction of the conveyor with sinusoidal motion is very difficult, an alternative type of motion having a triangular velocity profile is introduced. This allows analytical expressions for conveyor performance by simple methods to be derived. The results of this analysis are compared with the theoretical predictions for sinusoidal motion obtained by means of a simulation on the analogue computer. To simplify the presentation of the performance results, the design variables are reduced to two non-dimensional parameters, one for vertical acceleration and the other for horizontal sliding. The performance, too, is described by a non-dimensional parameter, so that the completely general performance maps presented for triangular and sinusoidal track velocity profiles need contain only three parameters.