34 n BEARINGS, BELTS AND CHAINS March 2025 www.drivesncontrols.com App helps you to optimise belt tensions and to cut costs In the cement industry, machines rated at around 75kW that use V-belt drives are quite common. If such a drive runs continuously around the clock, its annual energy consumption can be 657MWh. The energy loss due to friction in the drive system is around 5%, so the drive actually transmits 624MWh to the driven part. But if the V-belt drive is poorly maintained and the belt tensioning is inadequate, the slippage between belt and pulley can increase by around an extra 8.5%. This slippage could cause the machine to lose another 53MWh of energy per year –equivalent of the electricity consumed by around 32 people in a year. Looked at another way, a single set of Vbelts is therefore wasting the energy consumed by the occupants of a mid-sized block of flats in a year. This is why proper maintenance is so important when it comes to industrial belts. V-belts can lose their tension over time. While the resulting slippage is hardly visible to the naked eye, the example above shows how well-tensioned belts can save significant amounts of energy. The belt-maker Continental is offering industrial users a toolbox for tensioning their belts, in the form of a free smartphone app that measures the current tension of a belt and then calculates a target tension, helping to cut slippage. Users first enter application parameters such as the belt model and length, the pulley diameter, and the power and speed of the motor. The app then uses the equivalence between the tension force and the vibration frequency of the free span of the belt to calculate the target tension. To measure the tension, you first turn off the drive and then hit the belt like a guitar string using a screwdriver or similar tool. The resulting sound is recorded using the app's “tension” function, and used to determine its vibration frequency. This is compared with a previously calculated target value, revealing how well the belt is tensioned. With this information, the user can increase or decrease the tension until the two values match. Finding alternatives The app offers other functions that simplify belt maintenance and can sometimes cut downtime significantly. A “belts” function allows users to identify their belts and to find the best alternative that matches the application. A “pulleys’ function helps to determine a belt drive’s key dimensional gures using just a photo. The user takes a picture of the two pulleys used in the application. Using a single reference – the diameter of one pulley, for example – the app calculates the diameter of the second pulley, the centre distance between them, and the wrap angle. A final function, called “alignment”, determines the misalignment of two pulleys with the help of a photo and interactive tools. One of the main reasons for belt wear is pulleys that are not parallel. The app can store a photo of the drive motor along with its key characteristics. This data is can also be helpful for calculations. n The Make Power Smart app can be downloaded from the Apple App Store or the Google Play store. Industrial belt drives can waste an astonishing an amount of energy. To help cut these losses, a beltmaker has developed a free smartphone app that calculates how well a belt is tensioned and helps users to optimise the tension. Drive belts are a key element in industrial applications and their correct tensioning can contribute to energyecient operations. One of the app’s functions calculates an application’s key parameters from a photo of the application
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