Vibration Conveying

a process designed to move bulk and lumpy materials, pasty mixtures, and liquids in a particular direction; it is sustained by vibration of the working (load-carrying) members of vibration transportation machinery.

Equipment for vibration conveying includes vibration conveyors, which move bulk and lumpy materials, billets, and parts over distances of 0.5 m to 100 m (in some instances even farther) horizontally, vertically, or on an incline at plants, factories, mills, and construction sites and in mines and quarries; vibration pumps, for lifting liquids (usually water) to a moderate height or for pumping corrosive and contaminated liquids; vibration feeders, for supplying various materials to weight-metering and volume-metering de-vices; vibration hoppers, for feeding spatially oriented billets and parts to machine tools and manufacturing machinery— including those incorporated into transfer lines; and vibration troughs, for feeding concrete mixes from railway cars or other receptacles to the site where concrete is being laid. The operation of various types of machinery designed for unloading bulk cargo from railway boxcars is also based on the effect of vibration.

Vibration conveying can also be combined with various manufacturing processes—for example, cooling, warming, drying, mixing and agitation in vibration conveyors, classification according to size, dewatering and leaching on vibrating screens and screen conveyors—and with various chemical and physicochemical processes. Vibration conveying is most effective in moving granular and fine lumpy materials for which the horizontal rate of flow can exceed 0.5 m/sec. However, moving finely pulverized dusty products such as flour or cement by this method is more difficult.

The load-carrying components of vibration conveyors— tubes or troughs in horizontal or inclined (to 10°) conveyors—are cylindrical or prismatic and vibrate recti-linearly or elliptically; in vertical elevators or conveyors they are helical and vibrate in a spiral or elliptical pattern. The amplitude of the vibrations of vibration conveyors ranges from 0.5 to 300 mm; the frequency, from 50 to 1 Hz.

There are two types of vibration pumps: The first type has a vibrating column of tubes with a vibration drive located at the top and is used to pump corrosive and contaminated liquids; the other has a vibration drive that is immersed in the liquid stream and is designed to lift clean liquids. The throughput of vibration pumps is usually no more than several dozen cu m per hr.

Vibration hoppers are most often shaped as segments of a sphere or as an entire truncated cone on whose inner surface is placed a spiral trough with gradually increasing radius. Pieces of material loaded at random into the vibration hopper are fed out for processing in a strictly oriented position be-cause of the vibration and the presence of guiding plates, baffles, and recesses. Vibration hoppers have gained great popularity in instrument design and in general machinery design.