Efforts to improve industrial plant efficiency have spawned interest in making industrial plants relatively quickly and easily convertible from one industrial process to another. Convertibility of industrial plants permits plant managers to stay abreast of and provide for the demands of the market. A crucial component of virtually every industrial plant is conveyor systems. Thus, the convertibility of conveyor systems is crucial to the convertibility of industrial plants. In the conveyor system art, convertibility relates to accommodating articles having various sizes, shapes, physical characteristics, and orientations from workstation to workstation.
Typically, conveyor systems are designed to be used in a particular way to convey a particular article. Some conveyor systems offer marginal levels of modularity or convertibility.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,605,994 to Parlette discloses a pair of frame elements combinable by a coupling member and screws to form a unit frame assembly.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,800,938 to Stone discloses elongated frame members including an inclined web for close spacing of a transfer disk.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,825,108 to Stone discloses side frame members having top and bottom flanges with different horizontal dimensions to support different size conveyor chains. The frame members each have two mounting channels or T-slots, and they may be combined with tubular spacers.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,358,010 to Besch discloses a conveyor track having an upwardly open longitudinal slot and a downwardly open T-slot to attach the track to a cross member.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,511,031 to Lachonius discloses a conveyor girder having, at one or both sides thereof, two longitudinal open ducts situated one inside the other and which both can be reached from the outside of the girder.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,593,808 to Kondo et al. discloses a multi-level rack-type conveyor comprising L-shaped members, each having a pair of rollers.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,727,981 to Johansson discloses a conveyor beam for guiding and supporting a flexible track on sliding ledges.