METHOD FOR DETECTING LONGITUDINAL TEAR IN A CONVEYOR BELT

This disclosure relates to a method and apparatus for automatically detecting any longitudinal tear that is generated in a conveyor belt during its operation, utilizing detectable elements embedded at a plurality of points of the conveyor belt. An externally installed sensor and a control unit are also provided. At each of the aforementioned points of embedment in the belt, a set of at least two of the detectable elements is embedded, and the control unit is arranged (a) to receive and process signals from the sensor, the signals having a varied intensity corresponding to the number of detectable elements in a given embedment point, (b) to average the intensities of a plurality of the signals for the given embedment point, and (c) to judge, on the basis of the average obtained in (b), the presence or absence of breakage of detectable element or elements at the given embedment point. The abovementioned arrangement is able to judge whether one of the two detectable elements is broken, and the judgment is not affected by variation of the distance between detectable elements and the sensor. If breakage of a single detectable element of any set is identified, the affected element may be repaired during an outage of the conveyor. In this way, breakage of two elements of a point without any longitudinal tear will be eliminated.