A breakage model for spherical particles without pre-packing and its validation in an impact crusher

Abstract

The discrete element method (DEM) is a powerful tool for simulating particle breakage, offering valuable insights into the operation of industrial crushers. Although spheres do not fully capture the complexity of real particle shapes, their advantage in computational efficiency makes them highly valuable for breakage simulations involving a large number of particles with a wide size distribution. In this study, an improved breakage model for spherical particles without pre-packing is proposed, designed to offer high computational efficiency while maintaining satisfactory accuracy. In the proposed approach, the parental spherical particle is initially considered a polyhedron, which is then cut into a group of progeny polyhedral particles with a fast-cutting method. These fragments are subsequently replaced by spherical particles with the equivalent mass, achieving the sphere-sphere breakage process without setting the size and location of progeny particles in advance. The proposed model is validated by comparing its simulation of an impact crusher with both actual production (including product size distribution and energy consumption) and the polyhedron-to-polyhedron breakage simulation. The validation results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves significant computational efficiency while maintaining accuracy, making it a reliable tool for simulating particle breakage in practical applications.