A Brief Introduction To Bucket Elevators

By Author: Carolyn Clayton
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If you need to move large amounts of materials from one place to another then you will do well to make use of bucket elevators. Such items of equipment are used in a variety of settings but mostly they will be used in commercial and agricultural as well as in mining operations. There are also specialty manufacturers that create such items of equipment to suit different needs.

Bucket elevators are in the main used primarily to move high volumes of material and furthermore these devices can also move bulk volumes hour after hour without breaking down. One look at these items of equipment will show you that such devices are essentially conveyor belts that have buckets that have been attached to them.

These elevators can move vertically and they can also be made to slant at angles and of course they can also be used for horizontal transportation. It all depends on how these items of equipment are designed. Speaking of design, the buckets must be made in a manner that ensures that they can be made to swivel in a manner so that the elevator never loses their vertical alignment and so is made to stay upright at all times.

Furthermore, ...
... these devices must not allow spillage and the edges need to be scooped so as to ensure that when dragged through material that is to be transported that they can pick up the material during the dragging process. Typically, materials that need to be transported in bucket elevators include items such as fertilizer, ores as well as grains.

In its basic form these elevators simply move materials in bulk and dump the material in bulk, when they reach the top and then they return to pick up a fresh load. Mostly, material that has been unloaded is routed into chutes that may also be attached to storage containers or into bags in which the dumped material is to be packaged.

With the help of these elevators the entire process of processing materials becomes more mechanical and so it helps to keep the manpower requirements to a bare minimum. In fact, the only people that need to be hired are those that monitor the activity of the bucket elevator and who need to adjust settings, whenever required.

On the other hand there are also more sophisticated bucket elevators that are programmed to unload their loads at different locations and these elevators can even be made to run on flat tracks. Such elevators are also designed keeping in view that features should be used to prevent people from being caught in the elevator as it moves.

Furthermore, these items of equipment are also designed to work continuously. For this, the start as well as stop operations are minimized as excessive starting and stopping of the elevator can lead to inefficient operations and furthermore the fewer times the elevator is made to start or stop the fewer are the risks of spillages.

Companies that use these elevators can choose whether to operate the elevators for set period of time or they can choose to operate the elevators continuously.
For more information on Conveyor Systems and Bucket Elevators please visit Gough & Co (Engineering) Ltd.