Conveyor belt cleaner upgrade cuts carryback on long overland runs
A primary and secondary cleaner combination that holds tension as the blade wears, tested across a Mongolian winter.
Carryback on a long overland conveyor is not a housekeeping problem. It is a return-idler problem, a belt-tracking problem and eventually a structural problem, because material that leaves the belt at the wrong place accumulates where nobody inspects.
The tensioning question
Most cleaner installations are set correctly on the day they are commissioned and then decline. As the blade wears, blade pressure drops, cleaning efficiency drops, and the crew compensates by over-tensioning at the next inspection — which accelerates wear on both blade and belt cover.
The range we now stock uses a constant-force tensioner that holds blade pressure across the full wear life rather than at a single set point. In practice this means the cleaner performs the same in week twenty as in week one, and nobody has to guess.
Cold weather behaviour
We ran a primary and secondary combination through a full winter on a site where morning temperatures reached minus thirty-four. The failure mode we were watching for — elastomer hardening causing the blade to skate rather than clean — did not appear at the specified compound. At a softer compound, it did. Compound selection matters more here than in most markets, and it is worth specifying explicitly.
