Material handling machinery mainly refers to the mechanical equipment for material handling, transportation, lifting, stacking and storage inside enterprises (including wharves, material yards, mines and commercial warehouses, etc.). Generally including lifting machinery, conveyor, loading and unloading machinery, handling vehicles and storage equipment; It is customary to exclude means of transport such as automobiles, rolling stock, aircraft and ships, and pipes for the transportation of gases and liquids.
The application of material handling machinery has important significance in production, which is mainly because the amount of material handling is very large, some steel joint enterprises, for every ton of steel produced, the total amount of raw materials, fuels, semi-finished products, finished products and waste materials to be moved is often more than 50 tons; In addition, the cost of material handling is high, and the cost of industrial material handling often accounts for about 25% of the product cost. Material handling occupation of labor, in the degree of mechanization is not high in the enterprise, handling workers often account for more than 15% of the total number of workers; Mechanical handling must be used for manual handling of heavy items that cannot be carried out and for operations in areas of high temperature or radioactive material. Therefore, sufficient attention should be paid to the material handling system in production, and advanced and applicable material handling machinery should be adopted as far as possible to reduce labor intensity, reduce product damage, protect workers' health, improve labor productivity and product quality, and reduce production costs.
In daily life also often use some simple and small material handling machinery, such as a variety of trolleys. At first man carried things by hand, on his back, and on his shoulder. Then he gradually made use of animal power and created simple machines such as levers, pulleys, pulleys, and wheelbarrows.
Modern material handling machines began in the 19th century. Around the 1830s, there were lifting machines and conveyors driven by steam engines. In the late 19th century, due to the application of internal combustion engine, material handling machinery developed rapidly. In 1917, there was a mechanical system of computer-controlled material handling that could both lift and move forklifts.
Material handling machinery according to the function can be roughly divided into lifting machinery, conveyor, loading and unloading machinery, handling vehicles and storage equipment and other five categories. Generally speaking, lifting machinery for lifting and handling, but the handling distance is short, its mechanism for intermittent movement; Conveyor can continuously transport materials, transport route is generally fixed, mostly used to transport bulk materials; Loading and unloading machinery can pick up and unload materials by itself. Transport vehicles can flexibly arrange transport routes, economic transport distance is long, can be indoor or outdoor operations, with wheels; Storage equipment is a device for stacking, fetching and storing materials in the warehouse, including storage equipment, overhead warehouse and feeder. With the development of industry, many machines have various functions and USES. Forklifts, for example, are used to carry vehicles, to load and unload, and to lift heavy objects.
Material handling machinery is for production service, its design and selection should be subject to the needs of the production process, but the creation of new material handling machinery often leads to the change and improvement of the production process. For example, the emergence of bucket-wheel stacker and reclaimer has formed an automatic large bulk yard handling system with bucket-wheel stacker and reclaimer as the heart, belt conveyor as the blood vessel and computer as the nerve center, thus changing the layout of bulk yards in ports, mines and thermal power plants. Forklifts can be used instead of bridge cranes to simplify the structure of factories and reduce the cost of infrastructure.
In the second half of the 20th century, the unitized transportation developed greatly. The standardization of containers and the promotion of combined transportation simplified the loading and unloading of water and land transportation, and caused changes in the layout of stations and ports, as well as the structure of railway vehicles and ships.
The material handling machinery can directly and automatically transfer the semi-finished products of the previous working procedure to the next working procedure, and link up the next working procedure into a system to form a rhythmic production. It can also clean, dry, paint, sort, store, inspect and measure the materials at the same time in the process of handling, so as to reduce The Times of loading and unloading, shorten the production cycle and save equipment investment.
In many production and operation processes, the material handling machinery is no longer a separate operation machinery, but an integral part of the whole process. In the study and selection of material handling machinery, not only should understand the characteristics of material, handling of the purpose and requirements, as well as homework whether interference and pollution to the environment, also must consider, combined with the whole process of production or operation to make handling machinery with the before and after various close ties as a system, to reduce the loading and unloading link, increase economic efficiency.