With ContiTech out into the Caribbean Sea

With ContiTech out into the Caribbean Sea

"Barcelona really is located on the Caribbean rim”, argues Wolfgang Fischer seriously. A glance at the atlas shows that the application engineer of the ContiTech Conveyor Belt Group is right: Barcelona is in fact an important harbour on the coast of Venezuela, approx. 250 kilometres east of the capital Caracas.

There the largest tube conveyor in the world was installed. The conveyor links the harbour at Barcelona with a platform that is situated over a kilometre out to sea. More than 2000 tons of petrol coke, an intermediate product of oil production, are transported every hour on a ContiTech tube belt to this platform and discharged into cargo ships. This “off-shore” method of loading large ships is economic: “A cargo ship holding 60,000 tons can be loaded in only a day or two with this conveyor. So we not only shorten the effective docking time, but make sure that costly port charges do not become due in the first place” sums up Fischer.

The conveyor belt moves at more than four metres per second. An engine with a power output of 880 kilowatts acts as the drive unit. The constructor of this conveyor – ordered by SINCOR, an oil conglomerate based in Venezuela – is MAN TAKRAF Inc., Denver, Colorado. Project leader Gerhard Hertel is very pleased with the ContiTech solution: “Right from the start the functioning of the belt was excellent. The outstanding running properties of the belt enabled us to start up the whole conveyor in a very short time. So our customer was able to complete the acceptance testing very quickly.”

The tube conveyor system is particularly suitable for such applications: The conveyor belt wraps itself like a tube around the material being conveyed. So the system protects the environment, because chemicals and other hazardous goods no longer come into direct contact with their surroundings. The routing with vertical and horizontal bends does away with the need for transfer points. Noise emissions, airborne dust and wear are also minimised. Moreover, tube belt systems are very economic to run: no covering structures are necessary. And a compact design can be used for the entire route.

On its way from the harbour in Barcelona to the loading platform, the tube belt has to negotiate various bends before it can discharge its cargo into the hold of a ship. It goes without saying that absolute precision is essential to calculate the routing of the 2.20 metre wide conveyor belt that reshapes itself into a tube of 60 cm diameter. After all, tube belts are subjected to different forces than those acting on conventional troughed belts. “This is where we were helped by the CONTICOM calculation program that provided us with important information on the distribution of the forces within the closed belt, on the belt tracking in bends, and on the belt tensions under various loading and operating conditions”, says Fischer.

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