Author : Sunil Tukaram Shinde, Vidyadhar Sudarshan Dixit, Masnaji Rajaram Nukulwar and Shailesh S. Pimpale

A Bucket Elevator is a material handling equipment. It can elevate variety of bulk materials from light to heavy and from fine to large lumps. It consists of endless chain drive & on which metallic buckets are fixed. Bucket elevators always faces problem during buildup loads. In order to overcome this problem high capacity bucket is to be designed which will carry higher loads. This can achieve by using different materials. As new materials are developed and quality materials become more readily available, then changes in design have been made to adapt to these materials. Different iterations will be carried out to serve the best material. Also, bucket elevators often experience certain vibration while carrying a material. So the modal analysis will be done to find its natural frequency. For this a 3D model of bucket of elevator will be modeled in CATIAV5, meshing will be carried out in HYPERMESH, and ANSYS will be used for post processing. Based on results material optimization will be carried out and through re iteration best material will be suggested. Results obtained from numerical method will be validated with the experimental results.

Keywords: Bucket Elevator, material handling equipment, modal analysis of bucket, material optimization of bucket.

Article published in International Journal of Current Engineering and Technology, Vol.6, No.2 (April-2016)