Dual-field measurement system for real-time material flow on conveyor belt

Abstract

In this paper, an innovative dual-field measurement system is proposed for measuring the real-time material flow on the conveyor belt. The system consists of two light sources to illuminate the upper and the lower surface of the conveyor belt, respectively, and two binocular cameras to capture the dual-field contour images. The contour curves are extracted from the images by the contour acquisition algorithm and fitted with linear interpolation functions for the calculation of instantaneous cross-sectional area of material flow. Then the real-time volume of material flow is obtained according to the belt speed. Compared with conventional visual methods, the proposed method is no need to preliminarily acquire the data of the empty belt as well as hardly affected by belt deformation. Some measured objects are prepared for both sectional area and volume measurement. The results show that the accuracy of the proposed system can achieve up to 96.3% and 96.05% for the volume measurement of regular materials and coals, respectively, which is superior to the conventional visual method. The proposed measurement method has strong robustness and low construction cost, which is expected to generalize and apply in the bulk material transport field.