Specific energy consumption – the comparison of belt conveyors

Belt conveyors (BCs), because of their high efficiency, are widely used for bulk material handling in the mining industry. However, due to the high level of conveyors' energy consumption, the belt conveyor systems generate a large part of mining costs. Therefore, the current solutions mostly focus on implementing new management strategies, which find energy consumption as a key indicator in designing belt conveyor systems. Belt conveyor equipment selection, conveying systems, operation, applied mining technology are considered to be areas where improvement of belt conveyors' energy efficiency may be achieved. Moreover, they can be used to implement novel standards for BC equipment and the proposal of defining new quality standards and creating BCs' classification has been already outlined. The main idea of the paper is to compare the values of specific energy consumption (SEC) of BCs with regard to the inclination angle of a conveyor route which results from technological needs. The multiple regression is used to find a relationship between two basic independent variables – the volume of transported material and conveyor's inclination angle – and a dependent variable (SEC). The procedure enables to determine the value of SEC which is required for lifting the material. Presented results prove that the value of SEC required for lifting the material is crucial for the interpretation of the SEC value when it comes to energy efficiency comparison.