The Effect of Liner Wear on Gyratory Crushing – A DEM Case Study

Other conference contribution, 2011

Gyratory crushers are frequently used for first stage sizing in the minerals processing industry and are typically critical path fixed plant equipment. Hence any associated downtime or inefficient operation can have serious consequences for downstream processing and therefore the overall plant productivity. Despite the pressing requirement to tightly control gyratory crusher operation, no accurate, reliable, cost efficient, or practical condition monitoring tools or holistic performance assessment methods have been utilized by practitioners to date. This paper introduces a new method combining laser scanning based CrusherMapperTM software 3D liner shape information and Discrete Element Method (DEM) modelling to assess the effect of measured concave and mantle liner wear on gyratory crusher production. In order to illustrate this effect, two DEM models of an iron ore case study site are presented, one based on the 3D shape of newly installed liners, and the second on that of very worn liner geometry as at the time of replacement. The Bonded Particle Model (BPM) approach is used for modelling the rock material during the crushing sequence inside the crusher and other relevant DEM crushing parameters closely resemble actual production settings. A comparison between resulting modelling output parameters for the two liner geometries provides the basis for aligning actual with desired operational crusher performance.