US 4,054,092 A · Document counter

Abstract

Apparatus for feeding, separating, counting and stacking documents at high speed. Documents are stacked in the infeed conveyor and are bottom fed preferably by closed loop belts and an eccentric wheel which continuously jogs the stack. Drive rollers support the closed loop belts which serve to feed the bottom-most documents beneath cooperative stripper means which assures the feeding of only one document at a time towards acceleration rollers and a cooperating platen roller for accelerating documents fed therebetween to provide a gap between succeeding documents to enable a sensor to accurately count the documents. Counted documents are driven from an outfeed location into a stacker having a floor positioned beneath the outfeed location by a distance selected to prevent incoming documents from being interleaved in their improper order and from interfering with the documents being fed into the stacker. The platen roller also serves as a backing roller for endorsing means. The closed loop belts serve to impart rotary driving force from the platen roller to the drive roller and the jogging wheel and also serve as the document drive means during the feeding and stripping operation. The stripping means comprises O-rings entrained about spaced first and second roller assemblies. The acceleration rollers are driven by the platen roller and drive one of the stripper roller assemblies through flexible drive means interconnected by friction drive speed reducing means.

Claims50

Dependent claims

Apparatus for advancing sheets from a stack to an outfeed location whereby said sheets are delivered to said outfeed location in sequential fashion and the trailing edge of the sheet last advanced to the outfeed location is separated from the leading edge of the next sheet to be delivered to said outfeed location to form a finite gap therebetween, said apparatus comprising:

an infeed hopper for supporting a plurality of sheets generally arranged in a stack;
said infeed hopper having an outfeed passageway at one end thereof through which at least one sheet may pass;
continuously moving closed loop conveyor means for advancing at least the bottom sheet of said stack through said outfeed passageway and towards said outfeed location, said conveyor means including an elongated upper friction surface lying in a predetermined plane and positioned between said infeed hopper and said outfeed location, said elongated upper friction surface extending at least partially into said infeed hopper;
continuously moving closed loop stripper means for permitting only a single sheet passing between said stripper means and said conveyor means to advance towards said outfeed location, said continuously moving closed loop stripper means including an elongated lower friction surface positioned adjacent to an intermediate portion of said upper friction surface and extending at least partially below the predetermined plane of said upper friction surface, said lower friction surface being moved in a direction opposite the direction of movement of said upper friction surface;
said stripper means and said conveyor means cooperating to permit only that sheet which makes frictional contact with said upper friction surface to be fed towards the outfeed location and in the event of multiple sheets being fed therebetween, enabling only the bottommost sheet to move beyond the downstream end of said stripper means towards said outfeed location.

2 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

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Abstract

Claims50