A catalytic converter recycler needed material moved off the floor and onto a sorting line at a rate people could work. Remcon designed, built, and installed a custom heavy-duty infeed and sort line feed conveyor for it — a drag chain with steel flights, beltless, which was the customer's preferred choice of conveyor for this application.
The Line This Conveyor Feeds
A catalytic converter recycler is in business for the metal inside the converter, not the converter. Published descriptions of the process put decanning first: the shell is removed and the honeycomb-shaped substrate inside is extracted, and only then does the material get sorted, crushed, and milled down for the platinum group metals in the wash coat on that substrate. Everything upstream of that is the handling of steel-cased units rather than of a flowing bulk material.
This machine is the front of it. Remcon designed, built, and installed one conveyor doing two jobs: the infeed conveyor that takes what is dumped at the tail, and the sort line feed conveyor that lifts it and hands it to the sorting line at a workable rate.
What It Had to Do
- Turn a dumped load into a stream. Material arrives all at once; the sort line wants it spread across minutes. Feeding a sort line is a metering problem before it is a conveying problem.
- Climb. Loading happens at floor level and the line it feeds is up in the air. The conveyor covers the difference in one run.
- Take hard metal without flinching. Steel cases are the wrong diet for a rubber belt, and the customer's preference was a machine that does not have one.
- Stand on the floor it was going on. No pit. The whole machine, hopper included, sits above ground on its own legs.
Why Beltless Suits This Duty
The conveyor is a drag chain with steel flights (beltless) conveyor, and that was the customer's own preference for the application rather than a substitution made in our shop. The reasoning is worth spelling out, because it holds for anyone feeding a line with metal on it.
There is no belt anywhere in the load path. Two strands of welded mill chain carry bolt-on steel cross flights, 3 x 3 x 1/4" angle as standard, and those flights drag material along a solid steel bed. The flight is the carrying surface. Nothing is molded or bonded to anything, so there is nothing to cut, puncture, or peel.
The difference shows up in how the machine fails. A belt fails by event: something with an edge lands on it, there is a cut, and the cut grows on every pass until the belt lets go mid-shift. A steel bed fails by attrition. It thins, fairly evenly, where you can see it and measure it, and the swap goes into a shutdown you were taking anyway. The bed is built in replaceable sections of 1/4" plate for exactly that reason.
Metering Is the Actual Job of an Infeed
Each flight sweeps a fixed slice of the bed as it passes the loading point, so what leaves is set by flight height, flight spacing, and chain speed rather than by how much somebody just tipped in. Profile, height, and spacing are three separate decisions, all made against the material when the conveyor is drawn. Where the rate has to move from the panel, a variable frequency drive does it. Where a beltless drag pulls out from under a hopper, a metering gate sets the depth of the layer the flights carry away; on Remcon's existing design that adjustment starts about 13/16" above the chain and opens up from there.
The frame meters too. A dual-angle incline is the same idea built into the steel: steeper at the pickup so the flights take only what they can hold, shallower above it so nothing rolls back down the run. How steep is realistic depends on what is being lifted — the conveyor incline angle guide covers where the limits sit.
How It Was Built
What the installed machine shows: a loading hopper at floor level, above ground on its own braced stand rather than sunk into a pit; one incline run from that hopper up to the head; the carrying run closed in over the top and down both sides for most of its length, with screened openings along the side; cross-braced legs standing on the plant floor. At the head the conveyor discharges into the sorting line, which sits on a guardrailed elevated structure with stairs.
Above ground was a choice, not a limit: this machine gets built in a pit or on legs, and the decision usually comes down to what is already in the concrete.
The things that decide whether one of these survives do not photograph. Two are worth naming. Cross braces sit at least 4" clear of the flights, always — a flight passing close to a fixed member is a shear, and the clearance is designed in rather than guarded after the fact. And the flights hang off tabs welded to the chain sidebars, so those tabs are clamped before welding, welded top and bottom only with the welds stopped short of their ends, and preheated where the chain is heat treated. A bad weld on a load-carrying sidebar does not fail politely.
Designed, Built, and Installed by One Shop
Remcon drew this conveyor, fabricated it, and put it in. That matters more on an infeed than on most machines, because an infeed marries a loading area at one end to somebody else's equipment at the other, and the hood and chute work at those handoffs is where a split job goes wrong. Conveyors are shop fabricated in the longest sections practical, up to 40 ft, aligned to each other in the shop as they are built, then aligned and levelled again on site on legs with threaded height adjusters. Installation crews run 2 to 4 people and travel anywhere in the United States and Canada — a crew that size is also how a machine goes into a plant that has to keep operating while the work happens.
If You Are Feeding Something Similar
The questions that decide the machine are short: what goes in, what takes it away, how high it has to climb, how wide it needs to be, pit or legs, and what the discharge has to hood or chute into. Answer those and we can spec it and quote it from the shop floor.
Two nearby answers if the material is not quite this one. For mixed recyclables that a continuous surface would hold better, the rubber or PVC belt version runs on the same frame, tracks, take-ups, and drive; only what the chain pulls changes. If the material arrives hot, the plastic in the chain tracks becomes the limit, and the answer in this family is a steel pan belt on roller chain.
Catalytic Converter Infeed Conveyor FAQ
Why use a beltless conveyor to feed a catalytic converter sorting line?
Because nothing in the load path can be cut. Two strands of chain carry bolt-on steel cross angles that drag material along a 1/4" steel plate bed, so there is no rubber carrying surface to puncture or tear. The bed is a wear item on purpose: it thins gradually instead of failing mid-shift, so it can be measured and swapped on a planned shutdown. On this project the beltless build was the customer's own preference for the application.
Can a drag chain infeed conveyor control the feed rate, or does it only move material?
It meters. Each flight sweeps a fixed slice of the bed as it passes the loading point, so the rate is a product of flight height, flight spacing, and chain speed rather than of how much was just dumped in. A variable frequency drive trims it from the panel, a metering gate sets the depth of the layer the flights carry away from under a hopper, and a dual-angle incline adds a third control: steeper at the pickup, shallower above so nothing rolls back.
Does an infeed conveyor like this need a pit?
No. This one is above ground — the loading hopper sits at floor level on its own braced stand and the conveyor stands on cross-braced legs on the plant floor. Remcon builds infeed conveyors both in-ground and above ground, with hoppers custom built for each application. The choice usually comes down to what is already in the concrete and how material gets to the tail.
Did Remcon install this conveyor as well as build it?
Yes — designed, built, and installed. Crews typically run 2 to 4 people, arrive fully equipped, and travel anywhere in the United States and Canada. That crew size is also what makes it practical to install in a plant that has to keep running. Maintenance staff are trained in the procedures specific to the machine, and replacement parts stay available for the life of the conveyor.