Design of a queuing conveyor

Abstract

Many consumer products are assembled on automated assembly lines at high speed. Product is typically assembled one at a time on a moving conveyor but often must be removed and queued in blocks of N product for packaging. This project entails the design of a queuing conveyor that is capable of receiving automatically assembled individual product such as shaving cartridges at a constant rate and delivering a given number of product asynchronously to another station. The key to effectively delivering product asynchronously at high speeds is a system with multiple independent stages. A three-conveyor system was designed to complete this process. The cartridges enter the system from an indexing assembly line. The first conveyor takes the cartridges off the indexing assembly line while the second and third conveyors alternate between queuing the given number of cartridges, and delivering them as group at the output point. Several potential designs were investigated and two viable methods selected and developed in detail using CAD modeling and analysis