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Teeth Belt Tensioning Guide

17th December 2019

Proper tensioning cannot be stressed enough: too loose of tensioning will cause the teeth belt to ratchet (tooth jumping), while too tight of tensioning will possibly cause damage to the bearings, shafts and other drive components besides dramatically reducing teeth belt life. The correct teeth belt tension is the lowest tension at which teeth belts will transmit the required mechanical power and not ratchet teeth when the drive is under a full load.

Loose teeth belt tensioning acts like a loosely-held piece of string, with a snapping action as in a high torque situation the string or teeth belt will break because the added stress is more than the teeth belt was designed to take. While a taut string or teeth belt can stand a strong pull.

Take up any loose slack in the teeth belt by adjusting the center to center distance between the two teeth belt pulleys. Before any final tensioning is to be applied make sure that the teeth belt teeth are fully seated in the tooth grooves on both teeth belt pulleys. Check to make sure that the teeth belt teeth stay seated in the tooth grooves by rotating the drive system by hand. After the pre-tensioning steps are completed there are several methods for verifying proper final tensioning.

Numerical Method (Force/Deflection)

By measuring the deflection of the teeth belt with a known force the required tension can be applied. Specifically the target tension is broken into two values deflection force and distance. Using these two values along with a straight edge and a pencil style tension gauge you can install a teeth belt properly. While being a relatively quick method, this method is usually not very accurate. Primarily due to the difficulty in measuring small deflections and forces common in small teeth belt drives. This method is better suited for larger drives with long teeth belt spans.

Sonic Tension Meter

The sonic tension meter provides the most accurate tension measuring available.

teeth belts, like string, vibrate at a particular natural frequency based on mass and span length.

By measuring this natural frequency of a free stationary teeth belt span the sonic tension meter is able to instantly compute the static teeth belt tension based upon the teeth belt span length, teeth belt width and teeth belt type.

The sonic tension meter provides accurate and repeatable tension measurements while using a nonintrusive procedure, the measurement process itself doesn't change the belt span tension.

Measurement is made by strumming the teeth belt like a guitar string to make it vibrate and then hold the meter close to the resonating teeth belt to take a measurement.

ContiTech - Mechanical Power Transmission Drive Design Calculator

Both of the tensioning methods above require calculations to arrive at the proper tension value. Since time is of the essence in any project, I will not consume your time with details on how to manually calculate the required tensioning values. A tool that I find extremely valuable in both mechanical power transmission design and also in calculating teeth belt tensions is ContiTech - Mechanical Power Transmission Drive Design Calculator. This computer based program is an extremely valuable tool to add to your collection, and the best thing about it is that it's free.

Not to be out done by its competitors the other teeth belt manufacturers also offer a similar program for calculating the proper tension value.

This article comes from pfeiferindustries edit released