RESULTS OF BELT CONVEYORS NOISE REDUCTION WITH THE NEW CONSTRUCTION OF ROLLER HOLDERS

Abstract

Currently, one of the main problems in the extraction of useful minerals in term of environment is their transport in quarries. With the requirements to reduce the noise of the belt conveyor track, we were looking for a suitable solution to reduce it. So, we started thinking about attaching rollers made of a material other than steel. The final solution was to insert classic rollers in polyurethane beds called suspension cartridge - which are roller holders made of polyurethane and reinforced with a steel liner to withstand loads, wear and other environmental influences. This paper describes the development of cartridges. The solution must also take care about their complexity and production economics. The noise reduction also depends on hardness of the cartridges, so we made in 3 polyurethane hardness - 70 Shore, 80 Shore and 90 Shore. The next part describes the testing machine that we have developed for test the noise of every type of cartridges. The purpose of the tests was to determine the sound pressure levels of the noise according to the used roller holders � classic and in the suspension cartridges with different shore. We can state that our design of the roller holders can reduce the sound pressure level by at least 2.3 dB for the softest cartridges. Although it may seem not much, but this value in mining conditions is, however, very good and in the case of further modifications of the cartridges, the achieved values could be even better.