Conveyors can elevate the productivity of your warehouse operations, enhance safety practices and meaningfully lower labor costs.

Today's conveyors can move everything from heavy pallets to small packages within your material handling system and they are an integral part of advanced warehouse automation.

Conveyor systems can be grouped in three distinct categories for the vast majority of material handling configurations:

• Powered roller or belt systems (for carton handling)
• Powered roller or chain conveyor systems (for pallet handling)
• Non-powered conveyor systems

Powered Package Handling Roller or Belt Conveyors

Powered roller or belt conveyors are generally used for less bulky items like packages and cartons.

Conveyor belts are mostly employed for advancing packages along a line, while roller systems are employed for amassing cartons in certain areas along the line.

Belt Conveyors

Invented more than a century ago, conveyor belts are a staple of most material handling systems. Lower cost than roller systems and frequently more appropriate for certain functions like transporting lighter weight items, belt conveyors are used in many material handling designs.

Belt systems employ a long, looped belt that rides a series of non-powered rollers on a metal substructure called a slider belt. Motor driven pulleys turn the belt and move objects down the conveyor line.

Conveyor belts are configured with a range of materials and surfaces in accordance with the purpose and role of the conveyor. For instance, a belt surface might be perfectly smooth in portions where items need to be pushed off the line and may have a ridged texture on segments where goods have to be moved up gradients.

Roller Conveyors

While belt conveyors still have a place in most operations, newer roller systems feature a host of advantages in many modern material handling uses.

Most importantly, roller conveyors can enable collection of objects on the line where belt conveyors cannot. This is a meaningful contrast because there are innumerable scenarios where items must decelerate and accumulate in material handling applications. Common situations where accumulation is important are when objects must be temporarily halted before being passed to sorters or palletizers.

Some roller conveyor systems also have the capability to monitor objects on the line and implement zero pressure accumulation, meaning none of the accumulating objects come into contact as they decelerate and come to a stop.

Roller conveyors are comprised of several cylindrical rollers that are usually powered in one of these ways:

• Line-shaft conveyors: in a line shaft system, a long tubular rod runs beneath the cylinders perpendicular to them and is joined to each cylinder with flexible O-rings. A motor spins the shaft, and consequently drives the rollers via the attached O-rings. Line-shaft configurations are the most cost efficient of all roller setups, but they can also demand the most maintenance because the O-ring connectors between the rollers and the shaft need frequent readjustment and often break.
• Belt-driven roller conveyors: As you may expect, these systems are powered by a belt that sits beneath the roller surface. A motor powers the belt, which propels the rollers.
• MDR conveyors: Motorized roller conveyors, frequently called motor-driven roller (MDR) systems, are configured in sections where a single roller from each section is propelled by it's own power source. That one powered cylinder is linked to the adjacent rollers in that section via rubber O-rings, and therefore rotates all the rollers in the section. Powered sections are placed in sequence to configure the conveyor line.
  MDR systems are known for their energy efficiency because: a.) they usually are powered by 24 volt DC motors and b.) the motors can be set up to run only when an object is present on the roller cylinders, meaning they are inactive throughout much of the day.
  Although motorized roller conveyors cost more than belt drive and line-shaft systems, power costs and service costs are usually much lower than the other types of conveyors.
• Segmented belt conveyor: the principle of MDR conveyors ultimately begat the idea of segmented belt conveyors. Similar to MDR systems, segmented belts operate as discrete independent units and feature a lot of the same advantages of motor driven rollers, including accumulation capacity.

Powered Pallet Handling Conveyors

Powered pallet-handling conveyors are many times coupled with palletizers and automatic storage and retrieval systems. Pallet handling conveyors can usually accommodate gross weights of up to 2 tons and proceed at a far slower rate than package handling systems, many times at speeds as low as four pallets per minute.

Pallet-handling conveyors come in one of two types: roller conveyors and chain conveyors.

• Pallet-handling chain conveyor: perhaps the most rudimentary of all conveyors, pallets on a chain conveyor line are placed directly on two or more lengths of heavy duty chain. Motors propel the lengths of chain which in turn move the pallets along the line.
• Pallet-handling roller conveyor: somewhat like MDR systems, pallet handling roller conveyors use large cylinders and sturdy chains to connect the motorized cylinder to the remaining rollers in a conveyor unit.

Non-Powered Conveyors

Skatewheel or roller systems are the most common types of non-powered conveyors used in typical warehouse operations. These types of systems use inertia and gravity to move smaller products though pick modules, warehouses, automated sorters, workstations, loading docks and package sorting areas.

Skatewheel systems are comprised of many separate wheels and need very little power to prolong the inertia of objects as they move down a conveyor line. In general, they propel products quicker than non-powered roller conveyors and they have more flexibility when it comes to configuration. Given that they’re separate wheels in contrast to a belt, they are often used in curvilinear segments of a conveyor system.

In general non-powered roller conveyors are less expensive than skatewheel conveyor configurations. They’re frequently used for pick modules, workstations, and other zones where it’s useful to have a level platform to perform tasks. They may also be utilized to slow products down that originate from faster moving mechanisms like sorters so that workers can keep up with system performance.

Non-powered skatewheel and roller conveyors have a distinct disadvantage compared to powered systems: by employing inertia and gravity to move materials you forgo the option to regulate the force applied to those products. In other words, you don’t have control of the inertia and speed of materials on your line.

Conveyor Companies Near Me

If you’d like a full analysis of conveyor system options for your storage facility, distribution center or other material handling operation, contact a professional at Associated.

The Associated Milwaukee service area includes Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Kenosha, Racine, Appleton, Waukesha, Oshkosh, Eau Claire, Janesville, West Allis, La Crosse, Sheboygan, Wauwatosa, Fond du Lac, New Berlin, Wausau, Brookfield, Beloit, Greenfield and all surrounding areas.

Associated | Milwaukee Material Handling Equipment Supplier

N102W19300 Willow Crk Wy Suite B
Germantown, WI 53022
(800) 354-7502