Simulation of Surface Damage and Body Breakage by Using DEM

This presentation was made at the 2019 NAFEMS World Congress in Quebec Canada

Resource Abstract

This work presents a methodology to simulate a pilot-scale milling application with the use of an advanced breakage model and its calibration process. The presented model is based on the Discrete Element Methodology (DEM) [1] and some previous work from Tavares (2009) and Tavares and King (2002). It focuses on demonstrating the capabilities of the model to capture the different breakage mechanisms of a brittle material and is validated from single impact tests using data from ME Elecmetal laboratories.



The paper presents a calibration process that determines the DEM parameter values based on Drop Weight Tests (DWT), performed by ME Elecmetal, and analyses the simulation of an industrial milling application. The DWTs were replicated numerically using the presented breakage model in EDEM with different sets of model parameters. The results demonstrated that the breakage model can capture the complex behaviour of the brittle material with respect to material-product size distribution. Furthermore, the model shows that is able to describe the particle breakage and degradation from repeated stressing events inside the mill with high accuracy and assesses the performance of the equipment. The pilot-scale milling application is comprised from 2 tests with different conditions, each with varied steel-ball charge and chosen to provide a measurable amount of size reduction. The purpose of this test program was to generate the product size and power measurements for comparison with the discrete element modelling.