Numerical prediction of wear in industrial raw material flow

Abstract: Abrasive wear is largely involved in many industrial processes, and has far reaching economic consequences which involve not only the costs of replacement, but also the costs involved in machine downtime and lost production. Constructions and machines like conveyers, chutes and dumper truck bodies are often exposed to abrasive wear during handling of industrial raw material flow e.g. granular materials, rocks, etc. Different theoretical models and numerical models have been established to study wear phenomena. However, simulation and prediction of wear at large scale are seldom presented. In order to effectively predict abrasive wear in large scale applications, models for solid structure, material flow and wear behaviour have to be coupled together. To effectively study sliding abrasive wear of steel plates from interaction with granular material, numerical simulations can be an option. In this work both smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) and discrete element method (DEM) is used to mimic the granularmaterial flow behaviour. The finite element method (FEM) represents the surrounding solid material. To create models that reproduce interaction between solid and granular material both SPH and DEM are one at the time coupled to FEM. This gives a new opportunity to study abrasive wear in steel structures and also a possibility to estimate the absolute wear in large scale applications. In this work simulation and field measurements has been done on tipper and dumper trucks working with rock material. Wear pattern from dumper bodies obtained from numerical simulation shows a reasonably good correspondence to experimental measurements. An advanced analysis tool that takes into account both the actual material flows, coupled with wear calculation model developed for design and optimize equipment against wear, this is done within the multi-physics software LS-Dyna. In paper A the SPH/FEM interaction is used to describe an unloading of a dumper truck. In this paper the “load intensity” is found and used to describe the areas in the structure that is subjected to the highest wear. Paper B uses the DEM/FEM interaction to find the load intensity in the structure of a tipper body. Paper C is a continuation of paper B, were the Archard’s sliding wear law is applied on the load intensity to find the absolute sliding wear in the structure. In conclusion, numerical methods used to calculate local wear in industrial raw material handling systems is developed.