A Novel Embedded Conductive Detection System for Intelligent Conveyor Belt Monitoring

Continuous transport systems such as belt conveyor systems are playing an important role nowadays in industrial fields of logistics, transportation, storage, etc. Condition monitoring has been an established tool and widely applied to transportation management systems. However intelligent monitoring of belt conveyor systems is still in an early stage. This paper introduces an embedded conductive detection (ECD) technology that uses a magnet matrix embedded into the conveyor belt carcass and outside sensors to detect and monitor most of the conveyor belt parameters simultaneously. As a novel nondestructive test (NDT) technology, it overcomes drawbacks of traditional conveyor belt monitoring technologies and it has characteristics of absolutely maintenance free, long lifetime, non-contact monitoring and passive measurement. In this paper, applications of the main principle of the ECD technology have also been extended to the field of automatic guided vehicles (AGVs)