Granular wear - Model for wear in materials flow calculations
The main objective of this project is to understand the processes of abrasion and load of overburden materials and plate structures. Create a model for wear in advanced materials flow calculations, in order to predict the plate lives in different applications.
SSAB has long developed a strong position in the field of abrasion wear-resistant steel. Brand name Hardox has become the most famous brand name for hard steel worldwide. From the beginning SSAB worked on the development of wear-resistant steel in hardness 400 HBW and 500 HBW, and has now grown to the product portfolio with the range of steel from 350 HBW to 700 HBW. As part of building the knowledge and experience of wear and abrasion problems, SSAB for twenty years carried out research and development in the field of tribology, especially abrasion. During the 1990’s knowledge were built up in order to describe the sliding abrasive wear of steel plates, a skill that have resulted in a computational model. This computational model is capable of in a particular case of sliding wear calculate the relative wear of different steel grades. The last 5 years the development has been focused on including erosion and abrasive impact-wear to the model.
A natural next step is to couple this calculation for the relative wear with simulations of material flow and thus obtain a basis for further understanding of the real situations of abrasive wear found in industrial processes. In recent years numerical tools have been developed for large flow simulations for example smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method, discrete element method (DEM), element free Galerkin (EFG), and particle finite element method (PFEM). These tools are of interest as they can reproduce many industrial problems. An advanced analysis tool that takes into account both the actual material flows, coupled with wear calculation model would open up an entirely new field of research and possible areas of work.
An important research question is which process and material relations are most important for wear. In order to effectively analyze and simulate a structural wear and tear process material flows and wear calculation model have to be coupled. An analytical method for abrasion has to be developed in the project. The developed method is then implemented into a software for general availability in the industry. An important part is also to validate the computational models against experimental measurements of material flows and wear.
The project is funded by SSAB EMEA.
Research Student: Dan Forsström
Principal supervisor: Pär Jonsén, Solid Mechanics LTU
Assistant Advisors: Mats Oldenburg, Solid Mechanics LTU and Patric Waara, SSAB EMEA