How to Calculate Load Carrying Capacity of Conveyor Rollers?

Load carrying capacity of conveyor rollers is crucial for the conveyor system. Under designing the system may land you in trouble damaging the system. Over designing the conveyor system might go over budgeting.

Calculating load on conveyor roller is simple arithmetic and very easy. Assume that you have to design a Gravity Roller Conveyor System for carton box conveying.
 Weight of the carton box is 50kg
 Length of the box is 400mm
 Width of the box is 300mm
 Lets Calculate
 width of the rollers = width of the carton box + 50mm
 So Roller length is 350mm
 Now we have to decide how many rollers will be below the carton box?
 For a component, Box, product to be stable 3nos of rollers are required below it, assuming equal distribution of weight in the product. So 400/3 = 133mm will be roller pitch. ( Roller Pitch is always considered as Centre to Centre) . We will consider roller pitch as 100mm on a safer side. so there will be 4 rollers below the box at any time. It means 50kg weight will be distributed on 4nos of rollers. Calculating further we shall get 12.5kg
 Finally we need 12.5kg of load carrying capacity roller over a length of 350mm.

 
 ​In Spite of all above calculations and load Capacity Chart, one should note that above the capacities at the chart are indicative only. The load carrying capacity is dependent on lot of other factors like product weight concentricity, impact load generated on the rollers while loading the component on conveyor.