Conveying and Construction Machinery

In this chapter, the fundamentals of design of conveying and construction machinery will be presented. Machines that fulfill transportation tasks in limited operating areas such as mines, ports, work and storage yards, as well as construction sites are most common and can be found in any type of industry. Hence, the diversity of conveying and construction machinery is very wide. However, the typical driving elements, machine components, and calculation concepts are similar. The group of construction machinery covers many machines, e.g., concrete mixers or compactors that are not used for material transport. Such machines are not discussed in this chapter. While the machinery belonging to the group of conveying technology is very diverse, many machine drives and parts are quite similar. The first aim of this chapter is to present a system for the classification of general materials handling equipment, which allows the understanding of the basic calculation methods. The two main groups of conveyors can be distinguished by their operational process: continuous and discontinuous conveyors. Another significant difference are the goods the equipment should handle: general cargo or bulk materials. The second aim is the presentation of the basics of the design and calculation of conveying technology and their main mechanical elements and drives. To understand the design of bulk materials handling equipment, the necessary basics of bulk mechanics are described in Sect. 20.2. The design and calculation of basic machine elements of materials handling equipment (e.g., steel ropes, chains or wheels and tracks) are presented in Sect. 20.3. Section 20.4 presents the most important continuous conveying machinery, followed by discontinuous conveying machinery in Sect. 20.5. The necessary storage equipment is presented in Sect. 20.6.