Vibratory conveyor / Oscillating Conveyor

A vibratory conveyor essentially consists of an open or closed trough or pipe, generally horizontal but not always so, and which is elastically supported on a base structure or suspended from an overhead structure by springs. The trough or pipe is caused to oscillate at high frequency and small amplitude by an appropriate drive mechanism. Vibratory conveyors are commonly employed in industry to carry a wide variety of particulate and granular types of bulk materials. The fundamental action of the vibrating troughs on the bulk material loaded on it is to throw the particles upward in the forward direction so that the material performs series of short hopping movement and propagates at a certain speed.

Oscillating conveyors are utilized to convey sand or other granular particles at a desired rate. The conveyor is generally placed under a vibrating shakeout or a grid to eliminate direct handling of hot sand by the belt conveyor. In the process of reciprocation, the oscillating conveyor cools the hot sand to some extent which increases the life of the return sand conveyor belt.

An important characteristic of vibratory conveyor is the ease with which the flow rate of the conveyed material can be controlled by adjusting the amplitude and or frequency of the vibration. This particular aspects of such conveyor has led to the wide spread application of vibrating trough as feeders employed to supply material in controlled amount to various machines. When the trough is replaced by a screen, the vibratory conveyor may serve as vibrating screen, which has wide application in various industries. A distinction must be made between feeders and conveyors. A feeder is used as a discharge device under a storage hopper or bin and is subjected to varying head loads. A conveyor requires regulated feed rate and must not operate under varying head load conditions.

Construction details of Oscillating Conveyor:

INDUCTIVE CHARGING

In the future all electronic devices will be wirelessly powered. Small, battery-powered gadgets make powerful computing portable.

The battery charger should be capable of charging the most common battery types found in portable  devices today.  In addition, the charging  should be  controlled from the base station and a bidirectional communication system between  the pickups  and base  station  should be developed.

Inductive Power Systems:

Inductive Power Transfer (IPT)  refers to the concept of transferring electrical power between two isolated circuits across an air gap.  While based on the work and concepts developed by pioneers such as  Faraday and Ampere, it  is  only recently that IPT has been developed into working systems.

Essentially, an IPT system can be divided into two parts;

• Primary and
• Secondary.

The primary side of the system is made up of a resonant power supply and a coil. This power supply produces a high frequency sinusoidal current in the coil.  The secondary side (or ‘pickup’) has a smaller coil, and a converter to produce a DC voltage.

Working of Inductive Power Transfer:

In this system communications signals are encoded onto the waveform that provides power to the air gap. Communication from the primary side to the secondary is implemented by switching the power signal at the output of the resonant converter between its normal level  and a lower level which is detectable by the pickup but still provides enough power to control the pickup microcontroller. This process is called Amplitude Shift Keying (ASK). This is achieved by varying the output voltage of the buck converter which provides an input DC voltage to the resonant converter.

Communication from the secondary to the primary is achieved by a process called Load Shift Keying (LSK).  This involves varying the loading on the pickup.   Any load on the pickup will reflect a voltage on the primary circuit proportional to the load.  Therefore a variation in the load on the pickup can be detected by the charging station.

The communications system must provide two discrete levels of voltage reflected onto the primary side,  to represent the on and off states for digital communications. The difference must be easily detected on the primary side to provide a robust communications channel. Signals are decoded by simple filters and comparators which feed a  digital signal to the microcontrollers.

Advantages:

IPT has a number of advantages over other power transfer methods  – it is unaffected by dirt, dust, water, or chemicals.  In situations such as coal mining IPT prevents sparks and other hazards.  As the coupling is magnetic, there is no risk of electrocution even when used in high power systems.  This makes IPT very suitable for  transport  systems where vehicles follow a fixed track,  such as  in factory materials handling.