It can be said that many production means and consumer goods in use today are actually associated with comminution. For example, a machine tool is made of steel, the production of which starts from mining and comminution of iron ore. Also, the production of cement used for construction of houses and buildings where we live and work begins with crushing of limestone and ends with grinding of cement clinker. Coal comminution is still included in the production of electricity indispensable for modern production and life. Thus, it can be said that comminution is an essential part in many fields of economy, consuming a greater amount of energy. Therefore, it is very important to reduce energy consumption of a comminution machine by studying its working process on scientific basis.
Breaking in a hammer crusher, a kind of machine for comminution, occurs fundamentally due to collision between the hammer and agglomerate. So it is of great importance to study the collision breakage process between the hammer and agglomerate. In particular, accurate calculation of the energy loss quantity of a hammer in the collision breakage process is one of the key issues in determining the breakage power of a hammer crusher.
Previous studies on collision crushing in the hammer crusher by DEM considered the collision process between hammer modeling in the wall and agglomerate. However, the wall in the DEM model has no mass, so its energy cannot be considered. Thus, the aforementioned simulation methods cannot calculate the energy change of the hammer in the collision process. The aim of studying the collision crushing between the hammer and agglomerate in the hammer crusher is to estimate the breakage degree of agglomerate due to collision and to predict the energy consumption in a hammer crusher by obtaining the energy loss of hammer in the collision process.
Hong Sok Gun, a researcher at the Faculty of Mining Engineering, has obtained the energy change in the hammer by making a particle model with a combination of particles rather than walls, in accordance with the nature of the DEM. From the viewpoint of attaching greater importance to the internal structure rather than the external one of the breakage process in agglomerate modeling, he made an agglomerate model starting from one perspective on internal crystal structure of minerals discussed in crystal mineralogy.
This method allows the prediction of energy to be added to the breaking tool to break the agglomerate by directly measuring the energy loss of the breaking tool in the study on the breakage process by DEM.
You can find further details in his paper “Numerical Simulation of the Collision Breakage Process between the Agglomerate and Hammer in a Hammer Crusher Using DEM” in “Shock and Vibration” (SCI).
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