Overhead conveyor is a common and useful component of many material handling system designs. It saves valuable floor space and can provide a safer working environment for employees as long the proper safety features are included. One key safety component of overhead conveyor is safety netting. It is important for companies to prevent loss of time due to material handling spills, or even worse, injuries.

To do this, the proper conveyor safety netting is crucial. It has become common practice for our team to always keep our customer's safety in mind, but also keep in mind a netting design that is aesthetically pleasing to compliment a new overhead conveyor system.  Below I have highlighted a few design points to consider when investing in safety netting. The goal is to avoid creating a potential eye sore in your facility, but also assist in a safe working environment.

How to Specify Your Conveyor Safety Netting

1. Determine the mesh size and capacity of your netting. To determine this, you will need to take into account your smallest product and your heaviest product.
    
2. Determine the amount of vertical, horizontal, and linear coverage needed.
   • Keeping your dimensions to common sizes of width and length to avoid custom upcharges for special sizing is smart practice.
   • Keep in mind the areas where your netting sections meet.  These areas are often looped together using simple zip ties.  Strategically placing these seams near drive locations, or tail assemblies is good practice.  Your maintenance personnel will appreciate it.
3. Determine your netting cable design.  This is a preference of appearance and application.  I personally like the "Box-Shaped" look to conveyor netting; which requires top and bottom cables on each side of the conveyor for coverage.  It presents a more fitted and consistent look that wraps under from one top cable to the next top cable, and provides maximum coverage.
   • Your application could also be safely guarded using only "Side-Guards", or a "Horizontal Guard", but wouldn’t have maximum coverage.
4. Determine your cable mounting design.  This depends on your conveyor ceiling drops and hangers.  Your typical angle iron drops and cross tube hangers can offer the opportunity to route cables via hole punching / drilling, but only after load calculations are performed by a professional.  This eliminates the need for additional mounting brackets and hardware in creating your cable mounting scheme.

Please use careful consideration, and follow standard safety procedure when performing any sort of overhead activity.  I hope the above design tips can assist you moving forward with your safety netting adventure!

Author: Austin Trusty