Proper drive belt maintenance is important to keep equipment running as efficiently as possible and to keep the various drive components from wearing prematurely. Sheaves and drive belts wear much more quickly than they should when excess slippage occurs.
Poor drive maintenance isn’t always a personnel issue – often drives are not easily accessed or production requirements dictate that equipment just isn’t available for routine maintenance checks by maintenance staff. Often the first indication of a problem shows up when a machine operator notices unusual noises or smells coming from the area of the drive or, worst case, the machine stops running suddenly.
Drive belt can be monitored while running by looking and listening.
At some point changes in ratio may have been desired to increase or decrease the output speed so someone changed one of the sheaves to change the speed. Maybe a 15 HP motor that was on the shelf in stores was installed when the 10 HP motor on the drive failed. Could be the machine that used to run only one shift per day for 5 days is now running 24/7. Changes like these can greatly affect belt life.
A properly designed and maintained drive belt should give a minimum of 1 year of belt life on a tough application – more on less demanding applications. If you aren’t satisfied with the life of belts on a drive, your supplier can help – a drive analysis and redesign may be necessary to eliminate the excessive downtime and production losses. An entire new drive belt is much less costly than one downtime incident.
V-belt drives are reasonably efficient when all the components are new and care is taken to properly tension and align the drive at installation. More efficient options are available if energy savings are the goal and in many jurisdictions, there are government / utility incentives to change from v-belts to synchronous drive belt. If you are using too many v-belts on an application, this would be a good time to consider making a change.
This article comes from je-bearing edit released