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 granular material flow e.g. sand, rocks, pebbles etc.Different theoretical models and numerical models have been establishedto study wear phenomena in different cases. However, simulation andprediction 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 becoupled together. To effectively study sliding abrasive wear of steel platesfrom interaction with granular material, numerical simulations can be anoption. In this work both smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) anddiscrete element method (DEM) is used to mimic the granular materialflow behaviour. The finite element method (FEM) represents thesurrounding solid material. To create models that reproduce interactionbetween solid and granular material both SPH and DEM are one at thetime coupled to FEM. This gives a new opportunity to study abrasive wear insteel structures and also a possibility to estimate the absolute wear in large scale applications. In this work, simulation and field measurements has beendone on tipper and dumper trucks working with rock material. Wearpattern from dumper bodies obtained from numerical simulation showsa reasonably good correspondence to experimental measurements. Anadvanced analysis tool that takes into account both the actual materialflows, wear calculation and optimize equipment against wearis developed. This is done within the multi-physics software LS-DynaIn paper A the SPH/FEM interaction is used to describe an unloading ofa dumper truck. In this paper the “load intensity” is found and used todescribe the areas in the structure that is subjected to the highest wear.Paper Buses the DEM/FEM interaction to find the load intensity in thestructure of a tipper body. Paper Cis a continuation of paper B, were the Archard’s sliding wearlaw is applied on the load intensity to find the absolute sliding wear inthe structure.In summary, numerical methods used to calculate localwear in industrial raw material handling systems is developed.