Material comminution functions of wet particles

Abstract

Abstract The current work presents an experimental procedure to determine the material comminution functions of wet insoluble particles immersed in liquid. These functions are necessary material properties to model particle breakage in various wet industrial systems such as hydraulic conveying and wet milling processes. This study also provides a comparison between the mechanical characteristics of wet and dry particles. The strength and elastic properties of individual wet and dry particles are measured by employing uniaxial compression tests. Other breakage characteristics of wet and dry particles during impact loads such as selection, breakage, and fatigue functions are measured using wet and dry impact testers. The wet impact tester is specially designed for this study, and details on the tester operation are introduced. Three different particulate materials are examined with different sizes ranging between 0.71 and 4 mm as follows: dead-sea salt, silica gel, and zeolite. The results indicate that the strengths of wet and dry salt particles are identical. The results also indicate that the wet salt and zeolite particles have a reduced effective modulus of elasticity than the dry particles. Consequently, five comminution functions including strength distribution, selection, breakage, equivalence, and fatigue functions are determined for wet salt particles. The results also indicate that the existing comminution functions models for dry particles are also suitable for wet particles.