Effects of compression and sliding on the wear and energy consumption in mineral crushing

The majority of the operating costs of commercial crushing are caused by the power consumption and the wear part maintenance. Better understanding of the variables affecting the compressive crushing is needed when aiming to lower the operational costs of material comminution. The gouging or high stress wear tests are commonly conducted with laboratory sized jaw or cone crushers that do not allow easy alteration of the movement or geometry of the wear surfaces. Therefore, a new innovative jaw crusher-type wear tester was designed especially for wear and mineral property research. The modular jaws of the developed dual pivoted jaw crusher allows flexible selection of jaw geometry, which is independent of the selectable compressive and sliding movements of the jaws. The narrow jaw design produces extensive wear in the specimens even when small amounts of abrasive are crushed. The reference tests with a structural steel show excellent repeatability of the wear loss and energy measurements during the tests. The results with varying sliding movement of the jaws showed linear dependency between the wear of the jaw plates and energy spent. A method to separate the energy spent in wear from the energy spent in comminution is also described in this paper. •A new compact and modular jaw crusher was developed for wear testing.•Wear of the jaw plates and energy spent in the jaw crusher test follow linear relationship.•Proposed method to separate accumulated work to comminution and wear specific work.