Flat belt

Flat belts

Flat belts were widely used in the 19th and early 20th centuries in line shafting to transmit power in factories. They were also used in countless farming, mining, and logging applications, such as bucksaws, sawmills, threshers, silo blowers, conveyors for filling corn cribs or haylofts, balers, water pumps (for wells, mines, or swampy farm fields), and electrical generators. Flat belts are still used today, although not nearly as much as in the line-shaft era. The flat belt is a simple system of power transmission that was well suited for its day. It can deliver high power at high speeds (373 kW at 51 m/s; 115 mph), in cases of wide belts and large pulleys. Wide-belt-large-pulley drives are bulky, consuming much space while requiring high tension, leading to high loads, and are poorly suited to close-centers applications. V-belts have mainly replaced flat belts for short-distance power transmission; and longer-distance power transmission is typically no longer done with belts at all. For example, factory machines now tend to have individual electric motors.