In order to guarantee the performance and reliability of the belt, many factors need to be considered, such as proper tension, accurate alignment, installation and maintenance, surrounding environment, design safety factor, etc. Among these factors, tension is a key factor, which accounts for 90% of belt failures.
If the belt tension is too low, the V-belt will slip, reducing the transmission efficiency of the entire belt. If the slip rate of the entire belt drive reaches 6%, the overall drive efficiency will drop to 88%, resulting in overheating, which will lead to premature belt failure, and at the same time, the pulley will also be overworn, and the additional energy consumption will increase dramatically. When the slip rate reaches 8%, the transmission efficiency will drop to 80%. At this time, the belt can no longer play its transmission function normally.
If the belt tension is too low, the timing belt will also have tooth skipping, and the positioning and synchronization functions cannot be accurately played. At the same time, due to the sudden increase in tension of the jumping teeth, the resulting impact can easily cause the belt to break. Even if the tension is not low enough to cause tooth jumping, but the meshing between the belt and the pulley is not reasonable, the tooth top of the pulley will be hard against the tooth surface of the belt, resulting in the belt teeth are easy to wear and tear, unable to maintain the normal tooth shape, resulting in failure.
Excessive belt tension increases the fatigue of the belt and related bearings, and even generates excessive torque on the motor shaft, resulting in bending and excessive runout of the motor shaft. Excessive belt tension can lead to premature failure of the above components, as well as additional noise and vibration, etc.
It can be said that the correct installation tension is critical to the overall belt drive, service life and associated bearing life. Therefore, it is very important to obtain an accurate and reliable tension when testing the installation tension.