Effective conveyor, material handling maintenance practices
Out with the old, in with the new
Consider replacing high-maintenance parts with new technologies, says Van der Graaf’s Matt Lepp
Proper analysis of maintenance-intensive parts and available solutions can go a long way to reduce time and money spent on conveyor system maintenance. With the wealth of new technologies available to the aggregates market today, many solutions are readily available to replace existing high-maintenance parts with low-maintenance or maintenance-free options, thus lowering costs and increasing system uptime.
A major maintenance concern on any aggregate conveyor is proper lubrication. With drives sometimes located in hard-to-access locations, proper lubrication of critical drive components is not always done at proper intervals, or at all, causing a maintenance-related failure.
Replacement of the failed component with a similar part will not fix the root cause of the issue. Proper analysis of the issue would indicate that replacing the failed component with a reduced-maintenance part would increase system uptime.
For example, replacing a conventional conveyor drive requiring weekly and monthly maintenance with a drum motor requiring maintenance only every 50,000 hours of operation would minimize or eliminate lubrication-related issues, saving maintenance time and money.
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