Design Audits

Overland Conveyor is one of the leading providers of belt conveyor design audits in the world. But why are design audits important?

Complexity of Design...

In a recent survey of product designers and engineers, 42% identified design and product complexity as the most important issue they face, well ahead of time-to-market pressures (13%), competitive pressure (12%), and cost reduction (11%).

Driven by market demand, manufacturers are continuously working to improve their products, delivering more features, innovations and elements to set themselves apart from the crowd. This usually means incorporating new technology and more automation.

Customers are also continually seeking increased throughput, more control options, and greater automation. Manufacturers must offer an increasing range of product variants and specifications and more frequent release of new products, or be willing to customize their products in order to maintain a leading position in the market. Component suppliers must maintain a larger catalog and respond more quickly to new applications with new variants and new material specifications.

All of this leads to increasing complexity, and the trend will not be changing any time soon. Most managers, having conceded that complexity will continue to increase, have turned towards technology to come up with ways to handle it better.

Need for Reliabilibity...

Belt conveyors play an important role in the transportation of coal. They are used extensively during mining, processing, storage, transportation and, finally, in the generation of power. Because a conveyor delivers a very small amount of material over long periods of time, it is essential they operate efficiently with maximum availability and minimum downtime. Unlike a truck or train that delivers large loads intermittently, a conveyor must deliver a small, steady stream of material continually.

However, reliability and availability are much more difficult things to quantify or even define as there are so many factors to consider when determining the appropriate goal. And because belt conveyors usually operate in a series, with transfers from one to another, downtime on one conveyor will mean total conveyance system downtime. For example, in a plant with 5 conveyors in series, availability of 98% on each conveyor (that might be considered acceptable) yields a system availability of 90% (that would probably be considered unacceptable). Therefore, belt conveyors need to be designed for very high availability. Although classical design methods have historically been considered adequate, it can be argued they are not adequate to meet the availability needs of current market requirements.

You can not afford to miss important details in your design...

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