Combined study of wear and abrasive fragmentation using Steel Wheel Abrasion Test

Scores of abrasive wear problems particularly those in the harsh environments involve remarkable breakage of the abrasive. One notable case is the ore breakage and the media wear in the comminution devices such as tumbling mills, where the abrasive breakage is indeed the objective of the process. While there are standard test methods for wear or breakage characterization of the materials individually, there is a need for standard test methods enabling us to conduct a combined study of the wear and breakage to create an environment similar to the actual applications. Steel Wheel Abrasion Test is one of the candidates providing us with such an environment to study wear, abrasive fragmentation and their inter-relation in one single apparatus because of its high-stress nature of abrasion. Moreover, there is a need for more precise tools of describing the quantity and quality of the abrasive breakage, and surface wear. In this research, breakage has been characterized through size distribution of the abrasive before and after the test, and estimation of the created surface area in abrasive based on the size distribution. Wear particles are collected from the used abrasive after the test using an electromagnet, precisely analyzed with laser scattering machine and their surface area density is calculated using the gas adsorption method. Characterization of the wear debris along with precise quantifying of the abrasive fragmentation provided powerful tools in studying the abrasive wear. Experimental results extracted from the Steel Wheel Abrasion Test indicate a strong correlation between the abrasive breakage and the wear which newly introduced tools were successfully capable of predicting. Additionally, the combined study of the wear and breakage enabled us to give explanation for some anomalous wear trends which were not justifiable in the past.