Modern Vertical Conveyors

These contraptions are designed to carry free powders, granules, and sometimes liquids up a vertical belt often several storeys high. Cambelt, a maker of industrial grade belt conveyors, builds innovative bucket elevator systems for a wide variety of applications from agricultural to mining to food preparation facilities.

Bulk material is loaded onto a horizontal belt from a storage container, another conveyor, or other source. Belts are turned vertical through a hold-down disc assembly -- a set of wheels that secures the belt along its track across an upward directional change. Firmly attached "buckets" built onto the belt then carry the material upward until it is unloaded through a hopper or onto another belt.

Bucket elevators obviously can't be cleaned by scraping like a flat belt. Instead, Cambelt uses a rotary belt "thumper" that shakes debris free from the belt and buckets during the return trip using intense vibration. Alternatively, air knives are sometimes used to clean these belts depending on the material being conveyed.

Spiral conveyors are very effective at lifting flat bottom containers using minimal floor space -- not to mention fun to watch. They convey product upward or downward along the spiral. The circular path of a spiral vertical conveyor makes it difficult to use one solid belt. And the adjustable slats or rollers they use leave cracks, which of course aren't well suited for the free bulk material carried by bucket elevators, but they're great for flat bottom packages.

Common spiral belt conveyors use overlapping slats supported by steel bearings to transition between a circular and a straight path easily and quickly. When this unique belt moves over straight sections of the conveyor at the top and bottom, slats are uniformly lined up parallel to one another. But when they move to the spiral section of the conveyor, one side of the segmented belt "fans out" to assume the circular shape of the path.

The ability to automatically load many packages on this belt at once makes a spiral conveyor a much more efficient system than most platform or fork lifts when high volume of product is an issue.