To learn more about Amatrol’s Mechanical Drives 1 Learning System (970-ME1), click here!
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To learn more about Amatrol’s Mechanical Drives Level 1 eLearning courseware, click here!
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In this video, Amatrol’s Industry Sales Manager, Mark Goodman, demonstrates on Amatrol’s 970-ME1 how to adjust belt tension using an adjustable mounting base after learners have worked through the eLearning lessons, “how to determine belt tension for an application” and “methods of adjusting belt tension.”
Amatrol’s Mechanical Drives 1 Learning System (970-ME1) covers mechanical drive installation, mechanical drive operation, motor drive alignment, and applications of various motor drive systems. Learners will practice hands-on skills like leveling an electric motor, calculating mechanical efficiency, installing a flexible jaw coupling, installing and removing a chain with a master link using a chain puller, and installing and aligning a sleeve coupling and shaft.
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Transcript:
I want to move on from skill number four and take what we were able to calculate relative to belt deflection and actually do that in the hands-on activity and skill capability built into skill number five on the 970-ME1 system.
So I've taken the liberty to do a little bit of pre-setup to where I've mounted the adjustable motor base, the electric motor, a set of pillow block bearings, the shaft through there, a driver pulley through the motor, and driven pulley on the auxiliary shaft. I've also plugged it into electricity. I'm going to put my safety glasses on for safety and I've got it locked out and tagged out right now.
So what we really want to demonstrate is the ability to understand how to effectively put on a v-belt onto a motor drive system. So I've got this installed an obviously I think the age-old way of being able to determine if a belt is too tight or too loose was to put some type of pressure on it which I see a lot of technicians doing. Some of them will hit it. Some of them will push it. And the age-old question is, "How loose is too loose?" Obviously what I've got going on here is too loose. What most people don't understand is that there is an actual scientific method of being able to determine how tight we make this belt.
So in the last exercise we looked at belt deflection based on the diameter of the smallest pulley in our ratio and also the length between motor shafts of approximately 14 inches. I've got a 3 inch pulley on the motor. If I run through all of the calculations, I come up with about a quarter-of-an-inch of belt deflection per inch of my belt. I can transfer all of that directly to my belt tensioning device. On the bottom, I can put in my quarter inch and based on the chart that we looked at in the last exercise I know that it's approximately 3.4 pounds that I need to be able to move -- or deflect -- this belt.
We always want to be able to measure that by putting a straight edge along the belt itself and then we simply push down. And you can see in this case, I have it way too loose. So let's tighten that up a little bit. We'll adjust the adjustable base and tighten the belt up. Now I'm going to measure and see if I'm in the ballpark. I want to go back and use the tool as described.
(Process of belt adjustment and measurement.)
So now I know scientifically according to this belt -- the width of the belt, the length of the belt, and the drive system -- that this belt is now tensioned properly. I'm going to go ahead and test run this. We're going to install our safety guards. We've got safety switches embedded in the actual work base itself so that if these guards were to rattle off or be moved apart, the system would immediately shut down.
Now that the guards are in place, I'll take off the lock out / tag out device and power up my system.
Everything is running as it should. The belt's not flying off. Everything looks to be perfectly tensioned for this particular application. In subsequent skills, we could add a prony brake, put the motor and shaft and the power transmission system under load and be able to measure the overall amp draw of the motor, making sure that things are good. For learning exercises we can deflect the actual shaft, the alignments. We can set up too loose, too tight, and set up a lot of different applications to allow a learner to figure out how to do this in the most correct fashion.
That's how we take the blended approach from eLearning: understanding how to calculate some of these variables into a language that we understand and more importantly measure.
29 сен 2024
