Lagging Select: What Traditional Conveyor Designs Misses

Is your conveyor truly protected from belt and lagging damage — or just barely avoiding slip?

Conveyor drive systems are often designed using traditional torque transfer calculations like Euler’s equation, supported by CEMA guidelines. These methods help prevent full slip between belt and pulley. 

But what they don’t show is the localised slip that silently damages pulley lagging and belt covers — even when your design “checks out.”

Euler ≠ Protection from Wear 
The Euler method focuses only on power transmission — how much torque the pulley can transfer without full slip. It doesn’t consider: 

• Shear and normal stress at the lagging-belt interface 
• Localised slip that leads to premature wear 

• Fatigue failure of lagging and belt splices
  
  

What we need is a more complete view: 

• Analysis of stress propagation across the contact arc
• Understanding of how friction varies with pressure, slip speed & displacement
• Testing to define variant coefficients of friction — not just conservative estimates
  
  

This is where Lagging Select makes a difference. Lagging Select provides advanced modelling to analyse the cyclic stress distribution within the lagging and belt — helping identify: 

✅ Areas at risk of localized slip 
✅ Zones of excessive fatigue loading 
✅ Whether friction is sufficient to maintain contact without damage 

Even when a design passes traditional calculations, Lagging Select can reveal issues like 47° of slip or 106% fatigue stress — insights that can’t be seen through Euler alone. 

It’s time to go beyond simple friction numbers and design with service life in mind, not just torque.