| Summary: Particle flow may cause issues like wear, blockage, bottleneck, overflow, dust and spillage in industries. These particle flow issues reduce the lifespan of equipments while having negative impact on the material transfer process. The Discrete Element Method (DEM) is a numerical technique which is often used to predict the flow behavior of bulk solids, to model dynamic boundaries with ease and to design, analyze and improve material handling systems. Together with DEM simulations, it is possible to predict the problems that may arise as a result of particle-surface interactions and reduce these effects. As a result of DEM simulations, capacities of the facilities can be increased while maintenance costs are reduced. The behavior of a solid particle flow system depends on particle-particle and particle-surface interactions, and therefore DEM input parameters play a critical role for DEM simulations. Beside, the accuracy of any DEM model depends on the input values assigned to the parameters determined by a calibration process. Most of the parameters can be obtained by examining the impact, free fall, and particle-on-surface interactions of copper ore which is going to be analyzed. In this study, the wear effect of copper ore, which is in the form of solid bulk and dispersed in a certain range of particle sizes, upon mining transfer equipment was investigated by DEM simulations. Rocky-DEM software is used for the DEM simulations. The particle-particle and particle-surface interaction parameters are determined in order to perform DEM simulations for the bulk copper material. In this context, inclined plane, restitution coefficient, angle of repose and the drawdown angle, drop weight and wear experiments and calibration test setups are designed for the purpose of determining the material parameters, and tests were carried out on these equipments. The input parameters were verified by comparing the experiments and simulation results.
Keywords: Discrete Element Method, DEM, Wear, Calibration, Rocky-DEM |
