Comminution of agglomerates is an essential part in preparing raw materials in a lot of production processes, consuming a great amount of energy. Nowadays, demand for energy is further increasing in the world and environmental protection problems require us to reduce energy consumed for comminution. To solve this problem, we have to further study a breakage process of agglomerates to accurately estimate the breakage energy consumed for crushing agglomerates into requested grain size.
Knowledge on breakage pattern and breakage energy of agglomerate under different conditions is very important for control and optimization of comminution processes. Therefore, making a practical agglomerate model is the key to studying breakage processes of agglomerates and deciding technical parameters of crushers.
The common feature of these studies is that the experimental results of many agglomerate models were analyzed statistically because the arrangement of particles forming an agglomerate model is random and stochastic. It needed a lot of time for DEM simulation.
Hong Sok Gun, a researcher at the Faculty of Mining Engineering, has proposed a new method of making an agglomerate model by means of discrete element method (DEM) according to the crystal structure of mineral material by the principle of closest packing in the crystallography and of determining the microproperty of agglomerate models by back analysis fitting the cumulative mass fraction of breakage product, one of the external expressions of agglomerate breakage. In this new model, the packing efficiency 0.74 and coordination number 12 are nearly the same as those in natural minerals.
His method can be used not only to express the breakage process of an object but also to predict the breakage energy. In addition, it can remarkably reduce simulation time, one of the difficulties in DEM simulation, as there is no need to make many agglomerate models due to no-randomness and no need for a statistical analyzing method.
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