Experimental Investigation and Analysis on the Performance Improvement of Roller Chain and Forged Link Chain

Abstract

In industrial automation sectors, roller and conveyor chains are preferred in critical newlineapplications like mining equipment, agriculture machines, sugar mills, steel plants, cement mills, military equipment, paper mills, material handling industries etc. Various types of chains are made by manufacturers to meet global needs. In order to sustain in the competitive global market, industrial chain manufacturers are highly driven to produce quality chains with higher reliability, at the same time keeping it economical. In this context, in order to understand the quality of existing chain and for possible improvement, a study is initiated to solve the problems associated with the existing industrial roller and conveyor chain and their performance in field operation. This study is focused and designed with three phases namely, investigation on roller chain link plate manufacturing process, material investigation on bush and forged link. Based on the above study, a novel manufacturing technique and material selection has been done for performance enhancement. This research work reports experimental studies on roller chain link plate, bush and forged link are carried out for the performance validation. The research work is executed in the following manner. 1. In the preliminary investigation, link plates had failed due to fatigue from the hole surface and propagated perpendicular to the chain pitch. Here link plate pitch holes are manufactured by conventional process with low shear zone. To improve shear zone, a novel manufacturing technique called Slip Ball Burnishing newline(SBB) is proposed. This SBB technique improves 26.51% of fatigue strength newlinecompared to the conventional process