Design and calibration of the system supervising belt tension and wear in an industrial feeder

In the paper, the issue of the supervision of belt tension and wear in industrial feeder is addressed. The designed system is based on strain gauges that are built into the roller and are subject to the belt pressure at each revolution. In order to assess the effectiveness of this system, calibration and uncertainty analysis was performed. As a result, it was demonstrated that the main source of uncertainty was the function of approximation, while the others were orders of magnitude smaller. The final function provided results with accuracy of ca. 10% of actually measured value, which was assumed to be a good result for this particular industrial application.