At Feeding Concepts vibratory feeders are the core competence of our company. We know our wheelhouse and try to stay inside it. We deal and interact with all types of vibratory feeders every day.  Terminology is a key part of design and ordering of a feeder system.  We try to keep it simple and to the point.  When identifying your needs on projects but sometimes some words and terminology can get crossed and can cause miss ordered components.  Below is some basic terminology that can help you through the design of your next feeder order:

Bowl Discharge – XYZ output location of a Vibratory bowl.

Base Drive – Vibrator the bowl is mounted to.

Tooling – Construction that selects correctly oriented parts and removes incorrectly oriented parts.

Confinement Blades – Tooling that confines a part’s movement after orientation.

Cam – Tooling to rotate a part or thin parts down when feeding parts.

Pit free Surface – Eliminates all small seams / Cavities when welding metals pieces together on part running surface.

Off Tangent – Straight length of discharge track off the center of the bowl.

Basic Bowl– A vibratory bowl with no tooling.

Shingling – Parts that overlap and jam under confinement.

Fan tooling – Tooling Section that uses the parts weight with gravity to allow parts into a hanging orientation

Return Pan – Outside angle pan that brings miss oriented parts back into the basic bowl.

Air Selector – An air jet that engages a part for pre-orientation.

Passivation – Chemical process to inhibit corrosion in medical feeder applications.

Chord section –Tooling that is straight and most of the time machined for part selection.

Scallops – Profile sections that work with inner and outer dimension to select parts.

Pill blades – Tooling that uses multiple points of contact on parts to select leading and trailing orientation.

Profile – Tooling that uses the outline profile of the part to allow part selection and orientation.

Back Pressure Bubbling –  Tooling on feeder bowls that allows for parts to run with no track switch and backup into the bowl falling off back into the basic or return pan.

When ordering your next feeder, we hope the above terminology will help you in bridging the gap on ordering and design, almost all the above terms are used throughout the feeder industry. Here at Feeding Concepts getting a good understanding of your concept and matching it to what we are designing is always the highest priority. If you ever have a question or need a concept of your system we are always happy to help.