Abrasive Wear

Why Abrasive Wear Testing?

Abrasive wear results when hard and often angular particles slide or impact against a softer surface. Wear of equipment can be a costly problem when storing and handling abrasive bulk materials such as iron ore, roofing granules, glass, alumina, fly ash, clinker, sand, and copper concentrate. These solids can rapidly erode steel surfaces used in, hoppers, transfer, screws or vibratory .

Common factors affecting abrasive wear are:

• Particle hardness
• Surface hardness and toughness
• Velocity of particles across surface
• Solids pressure against surface
• Flow rate
• Impact angle
• Temperature
• Particle size, shape, distribution

• Sliding: evaluate abrasive wear with silos, hoppers, chutes with bulk material sliding along surface
• Impact: evaluate abrasive wear with hoppers or chutes where drop height or velocity causes damage

• overview of wear testing apparatus and experimental method
• results in graph and table formats
• qualitative observations of unique test phenomena
• conclusions and recommendations