Retractable conveyors

Conveyors used to distribute the product on treatment machines in an orderly manner

The product often comes from forming machines that place it on a conveyor belt in an orderly manner on various rows. Sometimes the customer wants to maintain an ordered position of the product on the subsequent treatment machines too, even if they use belts with different width. Usually these choices are made to optimize the work of the treatment machinery, since the randomly scattered product might get lumped or overlapped and therefore might limit the effectiveness of the treatment. The retractable conveyor responds to this need: it has a retraction device that moves its belt (with the incoming product) a handful of millimeters over the next conveyor. As soon as the product reaches the predetermined discharge point, the retraction mechanism goes into action and retracts the belt quickly so as to drop the product on the underlying conveyor without bouncing or rolling it, so the product maintains an ordered position. Since the direction of retraction is perpendicular to the direction of movement of the next belt, the retractable conveyor may unload the product on belts of any width.