A key asset of Royal Mail Group consists of a nationwide network of sorting offices
that forms a constituent component of the means through which the organisation
provides an efficient nationwide postal service within the United Kingdom. It may be
argued that the efficiency currently possessed by modem sorting offices is due to the
utilisation of machines that automate the process of sorting items of mail. The modem
letter-sorting machine possessed by Royal Mail can sort up to 30,000 letters per hour;
such machines serve as an example of an achievement of the application of
Mechatronics. The maintenance of letter sorting machines constitutes a large overhead for the
organisation. In the face of competition from pervasive electronic media within the
personal communications market and the prospect of deregulation, Royal Mail seeks
to streamline its operation in part by the reduction of the overheads incurred through
maintenance of letter sorting machinery. The adoption of condition based
maintenance techniques and predictive maintenance, for letter sorting machine
components such as belts and bearings, forms part of the strategy through which
Royal Mail seeks to reduce this overhead. Utilisation of flat belts and timing belts for
the implementation of key functions in letter sorting machinery, such as the transportation of items of mail within the mail sorting process, results in the use of
many such components within letter sorting machinery. A direct link exists between
the maintenance of peak performance of a sorting machine and the maintenance of belt drives; as such the maintenance of belt drives forms a substantial component of
the maintenance overhead.
The focus of this thesis consists of the condition monitoring of belt based motion
transmission systems and in particular, flat belts. The research that forms the basis of
this thesis consists of three elements. Firstly, consideration of current knowledge of
belt based power transmission such as knowledge of the mechanics of the belt based
power transmission process within the context of condition monitoring... [cont'd]
Funding
The EPSRC, Royal
Mail and Integrated Display Systems· (Gateshead, UK) funded this research
within the framework of the CASE studentship scheme.
History
School
Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2005
Notes
A Doctoral Thesis. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough University.