A belt conveyor moving cartons from receiving to sortation in a distribution warehouse — motor sizing, gearbox selection, and belt tension worked from first principles.
The project brief: a 150 ft belt conveyor — 130 ft horizontal plus a 20 ft incline rising 6 ft to a mezzanine sortation line — carrying cartons on a 30 in belt at 100 ft/min. It's the mechanically simplest project in this program's Real Projects module, and that's the point: with no process interlocks or code classification to hide behind, the horsepower, gearbox-ratio, and belt-tension calculations have to agree with each other or the design doesn't work.
This module walks the whole project the way a real mechanical design engineer would: a fully worked effective-tension and horsepower calculation (including the incline's lift-resistance term), gearbox ratio selection against actual pulley speed, a worked belt-tension and pulley-wrap calculation using the capstan equation, structural support and take-up design, and the guarding and safety systems required around a conveyor this length. The full worked numbers, complete bill of materials, and finished design reasoning are part of the unlocked module below.