Static & Fracture Analysis and Design Optimization of Drive Shaft in Long Distance Belt Conveyor

Abstract

In current age of process industry, demand of long-distance belt conveyor is rapidly increasing. For which lot of research works are under process to improve performance & durability of long-distance belt conveyor. For which there is lot of scope available to use high strength material to manufacture belt conveyor mountings & accessories to increase their durability & to reduce maintenance, which directly increase performance of long distance belt conveyor. During our analysis, it was found that there are major failure issues being reported for conveyor’s drive shaft. It was also understood that major drive shaft failure was due to incorrect design & wrong material selection for conveyor drive shaft. The objective of this paper is to optimize design& material selection of drive shaft for long distance belt conveyor. We have modified drive shaft designs over conventional shaft design & analyzed these designs with different high strength material materials. We have also concentrated to reduce weight and assembly cost of drive shaft which include drive shaft with Plummer blocks & bearings arrangement. For design optimization of conveyor’s drive shaft various design software’s i.e. CAD NX and ANSYS have been used. Static Structural analysis performed to find out directional & total deformation and fracture analysis performed to find out values of stress intensity factors & J integral of drive shaft, under defined identical loading & boundary condition. Design Modelling done on CAD NX & Finite Element Analysis done on ANSYS.