Evaluation of Internal Defects in Fabric Belt Joints using NDT Techniques

S Balamurugan1, Pavan Bijalwan1, R Shunmuga Sundaram1, Tibin Thomas2,Monojit Dutta1 and

Krishnan Balasubramaniam3
1
R&D and SS Division, TATA Steel Ltd, Jamshedpur 831 001, India
2
Dhvani Research & Development Solutions, Chennai 600113, India
3
CNDE, IIT Madras, Chennai 600 036, India
Email: s.balamurugan@tatasteel.com

Keywords: Fabric belt, Air coupled ultrasonics, capacitive, air pockets

Abstract
Fabric conveyor belts (consisting of multilayered rubber and fabric material) are widely used in steel
industries for bulk handling of raw materials like coal, coke, iron ore etc., and they need to be highly
reliable. It is impossible to make the conveyor belt systems for transporting the raw materials
without having any joints. These joints are done by either cold or hot vulcanisation process. During
this process, there are chances of formation of air pockets/delamination in the joint of the conveyor
belt. This defect is mainly due to improper vulcanising pressure or curing temperatures during the
joining process. If the joints contain air pockets / delamination, it will fail during its use at harsh
condition in the plant. Failure of joints in conveyor system can lead to increase the downtime of the
plant as well as the maintenance costs.

The present work was intended to identify and establish a suitable non-destructive technique for
finding out the air pockets or delamination inside the conveyor belt joints. Various non-destructive
testing (NDT) techniques were probed for assessing belt joint quality in order to identify the most
sensitive and feasible technique. Digital X-ray, capacitive and air coupled ultrasonic techniques
were deployed for assessing the joint quality. Among these NDT techniques, it is established that
the air coupled ultrasonic technique is capable of finding out the air pockets in fabric belt joints. The
smallest size of the delamination can be detected by air coupled ultrasonic technique is 30 x 30
mm2. This paper presents different NDT techniques, methodologies and the results of different
techniques to evaluate fabric belt joint defects.

1. Introduction

Conveyor belt systems form an integral part of almost every bulk material handling operation in any
industry. Fabric reinforced conveyor belting system is commonly used in steel industries to convey
materials such as coal, coke, iron ores, sintered products etc. It is basically a composite material
with two distinctly different materials composed orthogonally to achieve both strength in one
direction and bending flexibility in the other direction. A number of fabric ply-layers are used in the
belt construction [1]. These layers are bonded to the inter-rubber layers and to the covers by a
vulcanising process. The fabric material is made up of either polyamide fibers commonly referred to
as nylon [2] or polyester. Because of its composite nature conveyor belts are challenging material
for testing non-destructively. Fig.1 shows the cross sectional view of the conveyor belt. Splicing is
one of the main activities during belt installation at site. It is the method of joining the two
conveyor fabric belt ends together to form one continuous belt which is capable of carrying the raw
materials [3]. Vulcanisation is one of the methods of splicing fabric conveyor belts. It can be done
either in hot or cold process depending on the application and type of the conveyor belt.
In any conveyor system, the joint portion is the weakest area in the belt. Failure of joints or splices
in conveyor system can lead to increase in plant downtime as well as maintenance costs. Air
pockets or delamination is one such severe defect which occurs at joints during the vulcanisation
process. This defect is due to contaminated material used in splicing or poor vulcanising pressure
or curing temperature. Detection of air pockets or delamination by non-destructive way has not been
established well so that the defective joints can be avoided from being put in services. The present
work aims to find out and establish a suitable non-destructive technique for finding out air pockets
or delamination inside the conveyor belt joints. Advantages and disadvantages of various techniques
like capacitive technique, digital radiography and air coupled ultrasonic testing have also been
discussed elaborately in this work.

Fig. 1 Cross sectional view of the step splice in plied belting

2. Literature Survey

Failure of conveyor belt system finds its roots from many causes like poor joints, weak places in
parent belt, belt mis-tracking, idler or pulley wear etc. Poor joint quality is the most frequent cause
for conveyor system failure. Premature joint failure is a serious problem for any conveyor
installation and avoiding such joint failures are the inevitable need of industries. Based on literature
survey, it is found that capacitive, X-ray radiography and ultrasonic techniques are the techniques
likely to be suitable for monitoring the condition of fabric belt.

The capacitive sensor is an active device which generates a high frequency electric field. Capacitive
seneor technique of co-planar approach contains two metal plates kept separately at certain distance
on the samples. When an AC voltage is applied between the plates, it generates an electric field
distribution within the test material. This electric field distribution is affected due to property
change in the sample such as the presence of a defect within the volume covered by the electric field
[4].

X-ray radiography technique yields good results in defect detection where the defects produce
significant density difference from the background. The other technique i.e. ultrasonic testing
technique compromises sensitivity for the sake of achieving adequate penetration in belt sample[5].

An air-coupled ultrasonic source and receiver are coaxially aligned and placed in the two sides of
the conveyor belt in normal incident through transmission configuration with air as the coupling
medium.
Ultrasonic source introduces longitudinal waves in one side of the sample, travels across the
thickness and it is received by the receiver in the other side of the sample. A small fraction of the
incident energy is transmitted into the sample where it propagates through the material and interacts
with any boundaries and defects[6].

3. Experimental Setup of Different Techniques

3.1 Digital X-ray technique

Ultra heat resistant conveyor belt specimen was considered for this technique. Three specimens
were collected from the new conveyor belt. The size of the each specimen was 150 mm x 150 mm
x 16 mm. Initially the specimens were cut into two equal pieces in thickness direction. Flat bottom
holes were made for different sizes ( 3 mm, 5 mm , 8 mm and 10 mm) in one-half portion of
the converyor belt specimen. This portion was joined with another half portion by cold
vulcanisation process. Two more belt samples were collected from plants as shown in Fig. 2.

Sample from sinter plant Sample from blast furnace

Fig. 2 Photographic image of plant samples

Balteau NDT Digital X-ray equipment was used for taking the radiographic image of the prepared
samples. All the five samples were kept between x-ray source (130 KV) and flat panel detector for
imaging one by one. Detected data was acquired by the data acquisition and digital image
processing unit and in turn the output of the processed image is read in display unit or monitor. An
actual digital radiography setup is shown in Fig. 3. The quality of the sample is interpreted based
on the radiographic image.

Fig. 3 Digital Radiography Testing Setup for Conveyor Belt Sample

3.2 Capacitive technique

This technique works on measuring the change in capacitance of dielectric medium like rubber due
to the presence of defects in them. Microepsilon capaNCDT 6100 was used to measure the
variation in the belt joint quality. Fig. 4 shows the complete set up of parallel plate capacitance
sensor method for conveyor belt quality evaluation. Conveyor belt is kept between the capacitive
sensor and metal target in such a way that it work as a parallel plate capacitor.

Monitor

capa NCDT

Belt
Sensor

Fig. 4 Capacitive method for conveyor belt defect evaluation

Capa- NCDT instrument was integrated with computer to read out its output. Capacitance probe
was held by stand to maintain constant distance between probe and top surface of the belt and the
conveyor belt was placed on metal sheet, which is one of the target plates where the probe will act
as the other target plate. After setting the instrument, sensor reading for the sound portion was
compared with the defective portion.

3.3 Air coupled ultrasonic technique

Ultra heat resistant conveyor belt samples were torn off at middle to produce artificial delamination.
They were then joined by applying gum only in preferred area to produce desired sizes of disbond in
the samples. The size of the each sample was 150 x 150 square mm. Delamination sizes of each
sample is listed in Table 1.
Table 1 Delamination Sizes of the Samples

Sample Delamination Size in mm2

No
1 130 x 130
2 110 x 110
3 90 x 90
4 70 x 70
5 50 x 50
6 30 x 30
7 10 x 10
8 No delamination

The air coupled ultrasonic system employed for delamination detection consists Ritec RPR 4000
Pulser-Receiver system and 200 KHz, 150 mm focused air coupled transducer. Through
transmission mode was chosen, because of the large attenuation of ultrasonic signal in conveyor
belt. Fig. 5, shows the actual air coupled ultrasonic testing setup. During testing the sample was
held by fixture between transmitter and receiver. Transmitter- receiver set up was positioned
identically and it was moved for complete scanning of the sample with indexing of 0.3 mm and the
C scan system recorded the images for interpretation.

Fig. 5 Experimental Setup of Air Coupled Ultrasonic Testing Technique

4. Results and Discussions

Results of artificial samples and plants samples are presented in Fig. 6 & 7 respectively. In artificial
sample results of all the flat bottom holes were seen with high contrast which indicates that holes
like defects can be readily detected by digital radiography in conveyor belts.

Fig. 6 Results of Digital Radiography for Artificial Samples

On plant samples, the cut marks in sinter plant samples were seen but, delamination in Blast
Furnace samples was not detected because X-rays were travelling in perpendicular direction of
delamination which could not cause any density variation. Radiography falls short in detecting
delamination and air pockets in conveyor belts.
 Sample from Sinter plant Sample from Blast furnace

Fig. 7 Digital radiography results of sinter plant and blast furnace samples

In capacitive technique, the experimental results failed to distinguish the defective protion from
sound portion. The reason for this was presence of carbon block with rubber in the conveyor belt
samples in order to increase the strength. Fig. 8 depicts the relationship between conductivity and
the volume fraction of the carbon black in the conveyor belts. The graph clearly shows the drastic
increase in conductivity after a particular carbon black weight fraction called as percolation
threshold. The value of percolation threshold is 0.06 weight fraction, but in conveyor belt carbon
black weight fraction is 0.12 [7]. So conveyor belt dispersed with carbon black is not allowing the
material to behave as dielectric medium and that is the sole reason why capacitive technique could
not detect the defects in conveyor belt samples.

Fig. 8 Conductivity Vs. volume fraction of carbon black

All eight samples prepared as mentioned in experimental part were tested by air coupled ultrasonic
testing system. Delaminated portion allows less energy of ultrasonic waves through them and this
tendency of delamination is the key principle deployed for detecting the defects from the good
region. The test results are presented in Fig.9. The delaminated portions in yellow colour denote
less energy and the red region is the portion adhered tightly.
 (a) Sample 1 (b) Sample 2 (c) Sample 3 (d) Sample 4

(e) Sample 5 (f) Sample 6 (g) Sample 7 (h) Sample 8

Fig. 9a-9h C scan air coupled ultrasonic testing results

In C scan result of sample 1, the delamination indication size is 121 x 121 mm2, whereas the
original size of delamination is 130 x 130 mm2. In the same way, delamination size of other samples
observed from the result was little different from the original size, as listed in Table 2. C scan result
of sample 8, was uniform color which indicates no delamination in the sample.

Table 2 Delamination Sizes observed through testing

Sample Delamination Size in mm2

No
Actual Observed
1 130 x 130 121 x 121
2 110 x 110 110 x 110
3 90 x 90 95 x 95
4 70 x 70 77 x 77
5 50 x 50 64 x 64
6 30 x 30 30 x 26
7 10 x 10 Not detected
8 No delamination No delamination

The observed deviation from the original size of the delamination might be because of two reasons:
one is edge effect of the probe which depends on the size of the probe and it leads to greater size
than original. The second possibility is from sample preparation, since the samples were pressed
after applying gum, it must have squeezed into the area where it was not intended to join, but this
effect will not cause considerable changes in making bigger delamination size. Indication size is
approximately equal to the original delamination size and the results significantly distinguished the
delaminated portion from good portions.
5. Conclusions
Digital radiography found to be effective for detecting defects like cracks and porosity in the fabric
belt samples. But it is not an efficient technique to detect delamination/air pockets.

Higher amount of carbon black added in the belt causes rubber behave as a conductor and the same
reason makes capacitive technique not suitable for conveyor belt inspection.

Air coupled ultrasonic testing technique was found to be very sensitive technique for detecting
defects in conveyor belts as discussed in results and discussion. Smallest delamination detected was
30 x 30 mm2. Air coupled ultrasonic testing can therefore be deployed for testing conveyor belts to
detect delamination at the joint portion.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our management of TATA Steel for their permisssion to present this work.
We also would like to thank M/s Dhvani Research & Development Solutions, Chennai for their
kind cooperation during the entire project.

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