AU2023254955A1

AU2023254955A1 - Conveyor Pulley Lagging Wear Monitoring System

Info

Publication number: AU2023254955A1
Application number: AU2023254955A
Authority: AU
Inventors: Kyrylo Sliusenko
Original assignee: Individual
Current assignee: Individual
Priority date: 2022-09-13
Filing date: 2023-10-25
Publication date: 2024-03-28

Abstract

In one aspect of the invention, there is proposed a wear sensing unit assembly for a pulley, including a probe being retainable within vulcanised bonding layer of a pulley lagging, between lagging segments across the pulley face width; the 5 probe connectable to a sensing unit node and other probes of the sensing unit assembly (if any) by means of 12C data bus or similar. The sensing unit node is fixed on the pulley end-disc or inner surface of the pulley rim. The probe consists of measuring part and electronic interface input/output (1/O) expander chip where the measuring part of the probe is made of flexible printed circuit board (PCB) or flat 10 ribbon cable.

Description

CONVEYOR PULLEY LAGGING WEAR MONITORING SYSTEM FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates to an embedded wear monitoring technology for an industrial conveyor pulley lagging.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Pulley lagging is a coating or wearing surface applied to the pulley shell. Lagging protects pulley shell and conveyor belt from abrasion to reduce the risk of premature failure. Pulley lagging extends the life of the pulley because the wearing surface (lagging) can be replaced for less cost than the pulley or conveyor belt.

It is necessary to monitor the amount of wear of the lagging to ensure that the pulley shell is not impacted. Otherwise, it would lead to pulley's shell and conveyor belt damage with resultant downtime and excessive repair/replacement costs for the conveyor components. Therefore, condition of pulley lagging is absolutely critical for conveyor performance and reliability.

Due to wide array of environmental and operation conditions of conveyors it is difficult to specify exact amount of service hours for each pulley till its replacement. Therefore, it is important to monitor amount of lagging wear occurring.

One methodology of the wear indication in the published prior art, is found in US Patent Application No. US 2015/0300959 Al, which teaches A pulley lagging laminate with at least one inner layer having different light reflecting embodiments than the outer layer. When the outer layer wear reaches the inner layer, the different reflecting embodiments of the inner layer signal the need to replace the worn lagging laminate.

The use of such a configuration reduces the active protection sickness of the lagging and therefore decreases the actual service life of the pulley. It does not provide accurate indication of amount of lagging wear occurring during operation of the pulley until it reaches the inner coloured layer. It also does not allow live continuous measurement of amount of lagging wear occurring, hence cannot facilitate wear trending and remaining service life estimation, required for Predictive Maintenance programs implemented on modern production sites.

In addition, it requires costly visual inspections, which are not excluding a possibility of pulley failure occurrence due to undetected excessive lagging wear between the inspection rounds.

It should be appreciated that any discussion of the prior art throughout the specification is included solely for the purpose of providing a context for the present invention and should in no way be considered as an admission that such prior art was widely known or formed part of the common general knowledge in the field as it existed before the priority date of the application.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

It is an object of the present invention to provide for a wear monitoring technology that can be used on a wide range of conveyors and conveyor pulleys lagging materials. It is another object of the invention to provide a measuring probe arrangement that is embedded to pulley lagging for live continuous measurement of amount of lagging wear occurring during conveyor operation. It is still a further object of the present invention to overcome at least some of the aforementioned problems, or at least provide the public with a useful alternative. The foregoing objects should not necessarily be considered as cumulative and various aspects of the invention may fulfil one or more of the above objects.

In one aspect of the invention, but not necessarily the broadest or only aspect, there is proposed a wear sensing unit assembly for a pulley, comprising: at least one probe being at least partly retainable within vulcanised bonding layer of a pulley lagging, the probe connectable to at least one sensing unit node and other probes of the sensing unit assembly (if any) by means of 12C data bus or similar; at least one node fixed on the pulley end-disc or inner surface of the pulley rim.

The probe may consist of measuring part and electronic interface input/output (1/O) expander chip. The measuring part of the probe is preferably, but not necessarily made of flexible printed circuit board (PCB) or flat ribbon cable.

At least one probe may be embedded into the pulley lagging by being vulcanised in bonding area between lagging segments across the pulley face width. Preferably several probes are embedded into the same pulley lagging segments bonding area across the pulley face width, as such arrangement may allow to differentiate the areas of actual wear. All probes are interconnected electrically and communicating with single node by means of 12C data bus or similar.

The node is a compact, battery powered processing and communication electronic device which may include central processing unit (CPU), low power radio module, preferably compact embedded antenna.

The node assembly being locatable within compact robust enclosure fully encapsulating the electronic components.

The node assembly may also include a memory unit, wherein the data is temporarily stored therein, before it is transmitted at predetermined intervals or is interrogated by a device to retrieve the data. The memory component may be a non volatile storage device.

The node assembly may also include Inertial Measurement unit to perform detection of shocks, movement and positioning of the node and hence a pulley which it may be attached to.

The node assembly may also include GPS unit to perform detection of geolocation of the node and hence a pulley which it may be attached to.

The central processing unit (CPU) and the units mentioned above cooperate with each other and with other components of the node to perform the functionality described herein. Some of the functionality described herein can be accomplished with dedicated electronics hardwired to perform the described functions.

The node assembly may include a battery embedded within the electronics enclosure, or adjacent thereto.

The data transmitted via the antenna may be receivable by a fixed receiving module or a portable device. Communication may be by way of long-range or short range networks, such as but not limited to low power radio network, microwave data links, BLUETOOTH@, BLUETOOTH@ Low Energy (BLE), Wi-Fi, LoRa T M , Sigfox, NB IOT, LTE-M, or any other wide area network.

The wireless coverage of the system may be up to 100m for the short-range networks, or up to 10km for the long-range networks. Alternatively, the system may utilise 3G/4G/5G, NB-IOT, or LTE-M telecommunications networks or similar, or be connectable to a device that utilises such a network.

The fixed receiving module may be a communications gateway that sends the data to a remote server, such as a cloud server. The portable device may be a designated device for receiving the data that includes a designated software program. The designated device may include embedded software or firmware with corresponding hardware that is designed to perform one or more dedicated functions of the present invention.

In another aspect of the invention there is proposed a method of measuring, monitoring and trending the amount of pulley lagging wear, including the steps of: providing a wear sensing unit assembly in accordance with any one of the above aspects; receiving data from the wear sensing unit assembly using a fixed receiving module or a portable device periodically; measuring the amount of wear of the lagging of the pulley by a regular time periods; and

based on the information received from the wear sensing unit assembly to thereby establish a trend of wear of the lagging of the pulley to estimate the remaining service life of the pulley lagging and plan the pulley replacement work accordingly.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

The accompanying drawings, which are incorporated in and constitute a part of this specification, illustrate an implementation of the invention and, together with the description and claims, serve to explain the advantages and principles of the invention. In the drawings,

Figure 1 is a cross-sectional view of a pulley illustrating the single line probe embedded to the pulley lagging and outlet connector of the probe;

Figure 2 is a cross-sectional view of a pulley illustrating the intermittent probe embedded to the pulley lagging and outlet connector of the probe;

Figure 3 is a top view of the pulley of Figure 1;

Figure 4 is a top view of the pulley of Figure 2;

Figure 5 is a cross-sectional view of the pulley end of Figure 2, illustrating the probe arrangement being partly retainable in the pulley lagging and pulley rim along with the probe connector fixed on the underneath surface of the pulley rim;

Figure 6 is a cross-sectional view of a pulley illustrating the outlet connector of the probe fixed on the inner surface of the pulley rim and sensing unit node attached to the connector of the pulley of Figure 1 and Figure 2

Figure 7 is a schematic view illustrating the transferal of the data obtained by the pulley lagging wear sensing units via fixed receiving device.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE ILLUSTRATED AND EXEMPLIFIED EMBODIMENTS

Similar reference characters indicate corresponding parts throughout the drawings. Dimensions of certain parts shown in the drawings may have been modified and/or exaggerated for the purposes of clarity or illustration.

Referring to the drawings for a more detailed description, there is illustrated a measuring part of a probe 8 being partly retainable within vulcanised bonding layer of a pulley lagging 4 and connected through an industrial connector 7 mounted on a pulley rim 5, demonstrating by way of an example, an arrangement in which the principles of the present invention may be employed.

A typical conveyor pulley arrangement consisting of a shell 1, end disk 2, shaft 3, lagging 4 and rim 5 has been used in this document, however the reader will appreciate that other pulley design variations could be used without departing from the scope of the invention.

As illustrated in Figures 1 and 2, the measuring part of the probe 8 is embedded to the lagging of the pulley 4 along the width of the pulley. A flat ribbon cable or a flexible PCB with plurality of circuits forms the measuring part of the probe. The circuits are connected in arranged manner to the I/O chip 6 which detects whether each particular circuit is open or closed. As the wear of the lagging 4 develops through the service life of the pulley, the measuring part of the probe 8 wears off along with the lagging of the pulley 4 and breaks (opens) its circuits. Each next open circuit indicates the actual pulley's lagging wear development.

As illustrated in Figure 2, the measuring part of the probe 8 can be folded in a special way, to form an intermittent measuring line. Such an arrangement is useful in case if wear is required to be measured only on some predefined areas of the lagging of the pulley.

Figure 3 and Figure 4 illustrate a top view of the pulleys with the single line and intermittent probe embodiments respectively.

As illustrated in Figure 5, the measuring part of the probe 8 is embedded to the lagging of the pulley 4 from its bottom on the pulley shell 1 up until the surface of the lagging of the pulley. All folds of the intermittent probe are retained in the bonding layer 11. The probe also goes through the pulley rim 5 by means of the probe outlet channel 10 to industrial connector 7, where it is also connected to the I/O chip 6.

Figure 6 illustrates the sensing unit node 12 attachment to the probe by means of the industrial connector 7 mounted on the inner surface of the pulley rim.

In use, as illustrated in Figure 7, the data from the sensing units, installed on a conveyor pulleys 13, are transmitted 14 by means of a fixed receiving module (gateway) 15 to a cloud server 16 and then to a user 17 respectively.

The data can be transferred between sensing units installed on the conveyor pulleys 13 and the fixed receiving module (gateway) 15 by way of a long-range or short-range network, such as but not limited to low power radio network, microwave data links, BLUETOOTH@, BLUETOOTH@ Low Energy (BLE), Wi-Fi, LoRa T M , Sigfox, NB-IOT, LTE-M, or any other wide area network. The reader will appreciate that the range of the network may be up to 100m, or the network may be up to 10km, depending upon the application.

The data that is received by the fixed receiving module (gateway) 15 can be transferred to a cloud server 16 by way of a telecommunications network, fixed line or another wireless network.

The data received and stored at the cloud server 16 can be accessed by the user 17 by means of any desktop or portable computer device connected to the cloud server 16. The desktop or portable computer device may be a designated device for receiving the data that includes a designated software program. The designated device may include embedded software or firmware with corresponding hardware that is designed to perform one or more dedicated functions of the present invention.

The skilled addressee will now appreciate the advantages of the illustrated invention over the prior art. In one form the invention provides a wear sensing unit assembly for a pulley, that is partially embedded within a pulley lagging. The main processor and transceiver of the sensing unit is fixed on the inner surface of the pulley rim for protection of the electronics and better wireless connectivity.

Various features of the invention have been particularly shown and described in connection with the exemplified embodiments of the invention, however it must be understood that these particular arrangements merely illustrate the invention and it is not limited thereto. Accordingly, the invention can include various modifications, which fall within the spirit and scope of the invention.

Claims

1. A wear sensing unit assembly for a pulley, comprising: a probe being partly retainable within vulcanised bonding layer of a pulley lagging; an 1/O expander chip used for a digital way measuring of amount of the pulley lagging wear; a sensing unit node connectable to the probe (or probes) of the sensing unit assembly by means of industrial connector and communicates via 12C data bus or similar, which is fixed on the pulley end-disc or inner surface of the pulley rim.

2. The wear sensing unit assembly in accordance with claim 1, wherein the measuring part of the probe is made of flat ribbon cable.

3. A method of measuring, monitoring and trending the amount of pulley lagging wear, including the steps of: providing a wear sensing unit assembly in accordance with any one of the above claims; receiving data from the wear sensing unit assembly using a fixed receiving module or a portable device periodically; measuring the amount of wear of the lagging of the pulley by a regular time periods;and based on the information received from the said wear sensing unit assembly to thereby establish a trend of wear of the lagging of the pulley to estimate the remaining service life of the pulley lagging and plan the pulley replacement work accordingly.