Wear 271 (2011) 689696

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Wear
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wear

Combined study of wear and abrasive fragmentation using Steel Wheel Abrasion Test
Poorya Hosseini , Peter Radziszewski
Department of Mechanical Engineering, McGill University, 817 Sherbrooke Str. West, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2K6

a r t i c l e

i n f o

a b s t r a c t
Scores of abrasive wear problems particularly those in the harsh environments involve remarkable breakage of the abrasive. One notable case is the ore breakage and the media wear in the comminution devices such as tumbling mills, where the abrasive breakage is indeed the objective of the process. While there are standard test methods for wear or breakage characterization of the materials individually, there is a need for standard test methods enabling us to conduct a combined study of the wear and breakage to create an environment similar to the actual applications. Steel Wheel Abrasion Test is one of the candidates providing us with such an environment to study wear, abrasive fragmentation and their inter-relation in one single apparatus because of its high-stress nature of abrasion. Moreover, there is a need for more precise tools of describing the quantity and quality of the abrasive breakage, and surface wear. In this research, breakage has been characterized through size distribution of the abrasive before and after the test, and estimation of the created surface area in abrasive based on the size distribution. Wear particles are collected from the used abrasive after the test using an electromagnet, precisely analyzed with laser scattering machine and their surface area density is calculated using the gas adsorption method. Characterization of the wear debris along with precise quantifying of the abrasive fragmentation provided powerful tools in studying the abrasive wear. Experimental results extracted from the Steel Wheel Abrasion Test indicate a strong correlation between the abrasive breakage and the wear which newly introduced tools were successfully capable of predicting. Additionally, the combined study of the wear and breakage enabled us to give explanation for some anomalous wear trends which were not justiable in the past. 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received 1 September 2010 Received in revised form 13 December 2010 Accepted 13 December 2010 Available online 2 April 2011 Keywords: Three-body abrasion Wear Fracture Abrasion wheel test Comminution Abrasive fragmentation

1. Introduction Abrasive wear by loose solid particles is a frequent problem in the industry, commonly known as three-body abrasion. Threebody abrasion has been far less studied than two-body abrasion, abrasion in the absence of loose hard particles, due to the complexity that abrasive particles introduce in the modelling and investigation of the phenomenon. In the presence of high stresses and strains, the abrasive particles may be broken; and consequently, they may experience signicant changes in their shape and size. In the previous studies, this breakage of the abrasive has been largely neglected or has not been well investigated [1]. The fragmentation of the abrasive particles escalates and becomes highly remarkable in the harsher environments such as comminution devices. In these machines, large pieces of rock, which are indeed abrasive particles, experience huge size reduction and turn to tiny particles in the end of the process. Such signicant changes

Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 514 677 1370; fax: +1 514 398 7365. E-mail address: poorya.hosseini@mail.mcgill.ca (Poorya Hosseini). 0043-1648/$ see front matter 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.wear.2010.12.044

in the shape and size of the abrasive particles, which is in fact the objective of the process, cannot be neglected and need to be further studied. Considering the abrasive breakage and wear as two independent phenomena has been a common approach in the previous studies. Case-by-case study of the abrasive fragmentation and wear may lead to misleading conclusions, since these two phenomena are highly inter-related and abrasive fragmentation can denitely affect mode, severity and mechanism of the wear. Even if we are to consider breakage and wear as two independent phenomena, such independence must be proven and investigated through a combined study of the wear and abrasive fragmentation. The test apparatus which enables us to conduct a combined study of the wear and abrasive breakage is the one capable of creating high-stress abrasion environment. Steel Wheel Abrasion Test is one such candidate because of its metal-on-metal nature of contact. It is no surprise that considerable breakage occurs in the industrial applications where the interface has such a metallic nature like ball-on-liner interactions in ball mills. Other than having the proper test apparatus, more powerful tools are needed to evaluate the quality and quantity of both the abrasive fragmentation and wear. Creation of new surfaces along with size distribution of the

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Nomenclature P T S ri Ni Vi mechanical power average torque applied to the wheel shaft angular speed of the abrasion wheel total surface area of the wear particles radius of the particles in size range i number of the particles in size range i total volume of the abrasive particles in size range i volume of a single abrasive particle in size range i specimen density diameter of the abrasive particles in size range i

vi
di

abrasive is used to evaluate fragmentation of the abrasive particles. Aside from traditional method of sample weighing, wear particles are collected and their specications are determined through precise tools aiming at having a better understanding of the surface wear. The primary results conrm the strong correlation between wear and breakage of the abrasive which newly introduced tools were able of successfully predicting them. Combined study of the wear and breakage also enabled us to give explanation for some anomalous wear trends which were not justiable in the past. 2. Experimental setup 2.1. Steel Wheel Abrasion Test (SWAT) Steel Wheel Abrasion Test (SWAT) is a variation of the Rubber Wheel Abrasion Test (RWAT) which has been the most commonly employed test setup for three-body abrasion. In this test, a standard test specimen gets abraded with grits of certain size and composition (abrasive) introduced between the test specimen and a rotating wheel (Fig. 1). RWAT in its current structure was rst introduced by Haworth [2]. Since then, many variants of this machine were built; researchers proposed their own modications in the design of the test apparatus until the test was nally standardized via ASTM G65 [3]. This standard took on board some of the recommendations made by that date in its design; however, it is mostly based on the works done by Avery [46]. Since then, the standard abrasion wheel has been widely used to investigate abrasive wear

Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the Rubber Wheel Abrasion Test [3].

under varying conditions, materials and abrasives, and in general satisfactory correlation has been reported between the test results and eld experience [7]. Primary versions of abrasion wheel were built with a steel wheel instead of the rubber one [8]. Haworth criticized using of the steel wheel by arguing that the increasing size of contact area in steel wheel causes a change in the wear rate with time [2]. He suggested that using of a rubber wheel in its place alleviates the problem. After establishment of the standard which advocates using of the rubber wheel, Gore and Gates [9] were among the rst who did a detailed study on a wide range of materials using both steel and rubber abrasion wheel. They performed a campaign of tests for the materials with various hardness as well as different structures including the single-phase and double-phase materials. Due to observing some unconventional results, they criticized using of the steel wheel and expressed doubt about the usefulness of the steel wheel in the conguration they used. The next noticeable modication was measurement of the frictional force in metal interface introduced by Stevenson and Hutchings [10]. This was achieved by installing a load cell on the sample specimen and thereby monitoring the reaction force during the experiment. They also introduced a new design to control the sand feed rate, and also by mounting the specimen horizontally, they could determine the amount of abrasive that truly abrades the material. Thereby, the load per particle and packing density of the abrasive within the contact region between the wheel and sample was also measured. Radziszewski [11] found using of the steel wheel interesting in the mining industry because of two critical reasons. Firstly, the major cause of wear in a ball mill, the most frequently used comminution device, is ball-on-ball and ball-on-liner contact which are of a metal-on-metal nature. Therefore, using the steel wheel has the advantages of providing a similar abrasive environment to the actual application. Secondly, using the steel wheel creates the potential of running experiments in the higher force regimes which is closer to what happens in the actual mills. He also suggested measuring the applied torque by installing a strain gauge on the wheel shaft which can be used for calculating the friction force as well as the input energy into the system. The argument that abrasion in an actual mill takes place in a higher force regime is valid; however, two important factors should be considered. To begin with, applying higher forces between wheel and sample produces a wear scar which is deep and to some extend uneven. This increase in depth of scar causes direct metal-to-metal contact at the edges which reduces the force applied to sand passing through the wheel and the central part of the scar [9]; consequently, it may intensify the effect of unsteady wear change with time mentioned earlier by Haworth [2]. Secondly, assuming the wear occurs in the abrasion zone of the tumbling mills involves very high level of forces, it must be investigated how much the wear rate per unit of the applied load differs at higher force regimes from lower force regimes in an experimental setup. In conclusion, it is evident that some practical abrasive wear problems in the mechanical systems have a metal-on-metal nature of contact. In such cases, rubber wheel is not capable of creating an environment similar to the actual application. The issue to be addressed by further research is whether the results of the eld testing are in agreement to the ones obtained from RWAT or SWAT. Another problem that RWAT denitely falls short in solving is creating a high-stress abrasion environment accompanying with remarkable abrasive fragmentation. Such high-stress abrasive environment exists in many practical abrasive wear problems in the industry such as the case of the comminution devices or in high pressure rolls crushers. In light of the above, despite some legitimate concerns, using of the steel wheel seems to be inevitable; however, through further research and dening standard operat-

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691

Wheel
r

FT

FN

Test specimen

Fig. 2. Free body diagram of the abrasion wheel.

ing conditions, problems caused by using the steel wheel such as uneven wear scar may be eliminated. 2.2. Test procedure The test procedure is highly similar to that established for the ASTM standard with some minor changes [12,13]. Ottawa sand is used as the abrasive and the test running time is two minutes for all the experiments. While there are various specimen holders to t any given sample, one is designed to hold cylindrical specimens. The samples are cut from 50 mm diameter steel bars by means of a chop saw, in the presence of coolant which protects the cut surface from high temperature gradients, and consequently changes in the micro-structure. Specimens are used the same day of cutting or the day after to avoid any corrosion on the specimen; however, corrosion was not observed on the samples even weeks after. Fig. 2 shows the freebody diagram of the abrasion wheel. The normal force between wheel and the specimen, FN , is adjusted through the mechanism shown in Fig. 3, and should be calculated for each experiment. Using the free body diagrams of the force application mechanism, the momentum equilibrium of the forces about the pivot point is expressed as: W d1 + FT d3 FN d2 = 0 (1)

Fig. 4. Steel Wheel Abrasion Test apparatus.

where perpendicularity of wheel on the middle of the specimen face is ensured. Using the free body diagram of the wheel shown in Fig. 2, friction force (FT ) could be written as: FT = T r (2)

where T is the torque applied on the wheel and r is the radius of the wheel. The net torque applied on the wheel is measured by installing a strain gauge on the wheel shaft. Replacing Eq. (2) into Eq. (1), the normal applied force between wheel and sample is, FN = 1 d2 W d1 + T r d3 (3)

where d1 , d2 , d3 , FT and W are shown in Fig. 3. In the experimental setup used in this research d1 , d3 are constant, however, d2 may slightly change depend on the sample holder position. Sample holder position is adjustable and must be xed at the position
Pivot

Additionally, measuring the torque applied to the wheel shaft enables us to calculate the net power consumed by the wheel and thereby input energy into the system. The power input is simply the product of the torque acting on the abrasion wheel and the wheel angular speed, P = T. (4)

where is the rotation speed of the wheel which is adjusted via a controller (Fig. 4). 3. Breakage

d1 d3
Weights Wheel

d2
W

FT

FN

Sample holder

Specimen

Fig. 3. The mechanism of applying force in the abrasion wheel test.

Abrasive fragmentation has been usually characterized by measuring the percentage of the sand passing through a specic screen size [1,14], or semi-quantitatively through collection and screen analysis of the sand after the test [9]. In general, when matter is divided into smaller particles new surfaces must be produced with a corresponding increase in the total surface area. The creation of new surfaces is a good indication of the amount of breakage occurred in the process. This created surface area is a more accurate criterion for quantifying the breakage in comparison with the previously mentioned methods. Measuring surface area of the sand using its size distribution is not the most precise way of quantifying surface area of a matter; however, due to two critical reasons this method is chosen to calculate the surface area of the sand. Initially, it is because

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of the amount of sand used in the abrasion wheel test, which is 0.82.0 kg depending on ow rate and test conditions. Other methods of measuring surface area like gas adsorption use a sample of a few grams which may not be an acceptable representative of the sand used in abrasion wheel test. Secondly, the more important parameter is the variations of the created surface area with changing the test variables rather than the absolute amount of the created surface area itself. Sieving is a technique which sizes the particles according to their smallest dimension but gives no information on the particle shape; while in addition to particle size, the particle shape also contributes to the surface area of matter. Therefore, an assumption is usually made which assumes all particles are spheres. Of all geometric forms, a sphere has the least area-to-volume ratio. Thus, surface areas calculated from particle size will establish the lower limit by the assumptions of sphericity [15]. A powder consisting of spherical particles exhibits a total surface area, S, as described by equation,
n

Different samples of initial feed have been sieved and the average value is used as the initial feed size distribution. Therefore, the total surface area per mass unit is known for the initial feed. The sand used in the experiments falls down to a container and is sieved after the experiment for the size distribution analysis. Portions of this collected sand are the particles that do not actually get through the abrasion zone and consequently does not experience any fragmentation. Nevertheless, the discrepancy in the size distribution of the initial feed and that of the collected sand can be attributed to the sand fragmentation occurred in the abrasion zone. Therefore, this difference between the total surface area of the initial feed and that of the used sand is the surface area created in the process and will be used in our analysis.

4. Wear The standard recommends reporting the wear quantity in terms of the volume loss [3]. To this goal, samples are weighed before and after the test and the mass loss is recorded. Given the mass loss of the specimen and knowing the density of the material, volume loss can be readily calculated. This volume loss of the material may serve as a quick and primary way of quantifying wear; however, to investigate other aspects of the wear such as mechanism and severity of the wear more information is needed. High resolution photos of the wear scar has been one such source of information which has been implemented in the experiments [1,9,16]. While many mechanism have been introduced to describe the interaction between an abrasive particle and the wearing surface, a simple classication may be dividing this phenomenon into four main category including micro-ploughing, micro-cutting, micro-fatigue, and micro-cracking [17]. These mechanisms may involve fracture, fatigue and even melting of the metal. Wear equations usually provide a relation between wear quantity and the energy spent on the material removal. The energy expended on the removal of the material can be discussed from several viewpoints. The elasticity viewpoint relates the energy expended on the removal of the material to the volume of the material removed. This standpoint is probably the reason why many of the wear equations relate material properties and operating parameters to the volume loss. On the other hand, it is evident that in some mechanisms of the material removal, such as micro-cracking, the principals of fracture mechanics must govern rather than those of elasticity. Interestingly enough, Atkins showed that cutting can be regarded a branch of fracture mechanics even when cutting the most brittle materials [18]. Unlike elasticity equations, fracture mechanics principals, such as that of Grifth, link the energy expended on fracturemechanics phenomena to the surface area created in the process. For that reason, surface area created in the abrasion process may serve as a useful tool in studying the abrasive wear. To explore such possibility, specications of the wear particles including their surface area density and size distribution have been investigated using precise measurement tools. Over course of the experiment as the sample is abraded, metal particles fall down along with broken and unbroken sand particles into a container. Before any analysis could be done on the wear particles, they should be initially separated from the sand. Due to the metallic nature of these particles, magnetic separation is the most practical way of doing so. The whole sand becomes distributed on a table until a thin layer of sand is formed and then two electromagnets are used together to collect the metal particles from the sand. It should be noted that during the experiment the steel wheel is being also worn away; therefore, the collected metal particles belong to both the specimen and the wheel. Moreover, it is interesting to note that during the experiment, some of the sand particles get electro-statically charged and therefore attracted by the magnet.

S = 4 (r1 2 N1 + r2 2 N2 + + ri 2 Ni ) = 4
i=1

ri 2 Ni

(5)

where ri and Ni are the average radii and numbers of particles respectively in the size range i. Through screening the sand, the total weight of particles in each size range is known (Mi ) and thereby the total volume of particles in each size range is simply calculated as, Vi = Mi (6)

where is the density of the worn material. Assuming sphericity for the geometry of the particles, the volume of a single particle in the size range i is,

vi =

4 r3 3 i

(7)

Knowing the total volume and the volume of a single particle in each size class, the number of particles in each size range is simply calculated as, Ni = Vi

vi

(8)

Substituting Eqs. (6) and (7) into Eq. (8), number of the particles is re-rewritten in terms of measured mass and the radius of the particles in each size class as, Ni = Mi 3Mi 3 = 4 ri 3 4 ri 3 (9)

Substituting Eq. (9) into Eq. (5), the total surface area can be written in terms of the diameter and the measured mass in each size range,
n

S=4
i=1

ri 2

3Mi 4 ri 3

i=1

Mi 6 = ri

i=1

Mi di

(10)

To determine the size distribution of the sand, we used CAN/CGSB 8.1 sieving standard which has the same sizing as its American counterpart, ASTM E-11-01. It should be noted that screening gives us the amount of material in between two mesh sizes with no information on how these particles are distributed between these two limits. Assuming these particles have a Gaussian distribution between these two sizes, then we can assume all the particles in this size class have a diameter equal to the average of those two limits. For the rst and last size range, the average is taken using standard mesh sizes before and after them, respectively.

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693

Frequency (%)

To remove these charged particles from the metal particles, sample should be discharged by being connected to an electron source. Given the small quantity of these loose particles, they are sized by a laser scattering particle size analyzer rather than sieving method used for the sand. Fig. 5 shows a sample of size distribution analysis done for the metal particles using laser diffraction technique. The machine we used cannot analyze particle sizes bigger than 200 m. The surface area of the metal particles can be determined from their size distribution the very same way the surface area of sand has been calculated; however, because of the small quantity of wear particles, a more exact method is chosen. Surface area of wear particles is calculated using a surface area analyzer which uses gas absorption technique. While there are several methods to calculate the surface area of the sample by using the results obtained from this machine, BET theory is chosen for this purpose [15]. For these experiments, about a gram of the metal particles is usually chosen, placed in a tube and heated up to 100 C for two hours to be free of any humidity. Thereafter, they get weighed and put into the surface area analyzer. It takes approximately 3 h for the analysis to be completed; however, it can take more or less according to the behavior of the sample. In the end, the specic surface area is determined through dividing the measured surface area by the sample weight. 5. Results and discussion First set of experiments consists of ve different forces applied in a high-force regime, while rotational speed of the wheel is xed at 155 rpm. This force regime is chosen since it accompanies with remarkable abrasive fragmentation needed for the combined study of the wear and abrasive breakage; and to show how this combined study can lead to elucidate anomalous results reported in this force regime [12]. The specimens are cut from a steel 1018 bar, the same material the wheel itself is made of. The fact that the specimen material is the same as that of steel wheel creates symmetry at the contact zone. Thus, the specications of particles separated from the wheel and from the sample, such as surface area density or wear rate for two surfaces, are expected to be identical. This obviates the need for separation of the wear particles from the wheel and the specimen before further analysis. Quite interestingly, the weight of the wear particles collected from the sand following the test was about two times of the specimen mass loss

1 1.15 1.32 1.51 1.73 1.98 3.91 4.47 5.12 5.87 6.72 7.7 8.82 10.1 11.56 13.25 15.17 17.38 19.9 22.8 26.11 29.91 34.25 39.23 44.94 51.47 58.95 67.52 77.34 88.58 101.46 116.21 133.1 152.45 174.62 200.00

Particle Diameter ( m )
Fig. 5. Size distribution of wear debris using laser diffraction technique.

which corroborates the above mentioned assumption regarding the symmetry at the interface. Furthermore, it is of interest to note that in many applications where remarkable breakage of the abrasive occurs such as ball mills or rock crushers, two opposing surfaces being subjected to the wear are made of the same material. Therefore, selection of the specimen material made of the same material as wheel has the benet of creating a wear environment similar to the actual applications. The experiments were carried out twice for each test point to ensure repeatability and to increase the precision; and in the end the average values are used in the diagrams. Fig. 6 shows the wear rate in terms of volume loss versus the force applied between the wheel and the specimen. The wear increases linearly up to a certain level and then plateaus or even decreases with an increase in the applied force. This change in the trend after a specic load is in accord with other experiments conducted in the past using steel wheel within the same force regime; at different sliding speeds and for various materials [12]. Linear increase of the wear with increasing the load has been repeatedly observed in the past in low force regimes [9,14,19]; however, few nonlinear wear trend with increasing the applied load has been reported, such as exponential increase rather than linear increase, in a force regime comparable to our case [1]. More recently, Nahvi et al. [20] reported a wear behavior similar to the one in Fig. 6 when an ash abrasive, relatively soft in comparison to the silica, was used in the dry sand rubber wheel test. Intuitively, steel wheel tends to produce more fragmentation of abrasive than rubber wheel due to its high-stress nature of abrasion. The abrasive fragmentation is a function of test variables such as abrasive specications (type, shape and size), applied load and wear environment. Since these nonlinear behaviors occur in the high force regimes, which naturally accompanies with more breakage, the trend may be linked to the abrasive fragmentation. To explore the possible relation between the wear and abrasive fragmentation, we need to look at the quality and the quantity of the abrasive breakage. Fig. 7 shows the change in total surface area of the sand particles following the test versus the force between wheel and the specimen. The breakage amount, similar to the wear rate, increases up to a certain level and then starts decreasing with an increase in the applied force. Fig. 8 shows the quality of the abrasive breakage, abrasive size distribution, before and after the test conducted for 520 N of applied force. These quality and quantity of the abrasive breakage may be discussed from two main aspects.

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0.14 0.12

0.10 0.08 0.06 0.04

100 200 300 400 500 600

Applied force (N)

Fig. 6. Wear rate versus applied force.

4.0

3.5

3.0

2.5

2.0

1.5
100 200 300 400 500 600

Applied force (N)

Fig. 7. Created surface area in the abrasive versus applied force.

Firstly, the reason behind such behavior, and secondly how it affects the wear rate. Starting with the rst one, applying higher forces between the wheel and specimen is expected to accompany with an increase in the abrasive breakage which does not seem to be the case. With increasing the applied force between wheel and the sample, it becomes more difcult for the abrasive particles to get into the contact zone, especially larger particles. Therefore, the

60 50
After Before

Percentage (%)

40 30 20 10 0

100

200

300

400

500

600

particle size ( m)
Fig. 8. Screening analysis of the sand before and after the experiment for 520 N of applied force.

bypass amount increases, effective ow rate decreases and mostly smaller silica particles get into the abrasion zone. As silica particles get smaller, their fragmentation gets less severe than that of larger silica under the same condition. This is mainly due to the forces on each particle being smaller for the smaller particles (more particles in contact zone to carry the load), along with the fact that small particles have generally been observed to have higher fracture strengths than their larger counterparts [14,21]. The next important issue to address is how the quantity and quality of the abrasive breakage affects the wear rate. Silica sand particles have relatively a round shape, and lack of fragmentation causes in the morphology of the abrasive remaining mostly rounded. Newly broken abrasive is very angular and thus is a highly efcient abradent. It has been postulated that abrasion with this rounded particles result in a signicantly lower wear rate than that produced by the crushed sand [14]. The fact that breakage follows approximately the same trend as the wear rate implicitly indicate that this phenomenon to be the dominant reason for such behavior in wear rate. However, reduction in the breakage of the sand may not be the only reasons for wear rate decrease, because the increase in the applied force is expected to compensate the cutback in the abrasive fragmentation to some extent. There are several other phenomena that all have a negative effect on the wear rate. Firstly, generation of tiny particles similar to the powder causes trapping of these tiny abrasive particles in the asperities of both surfaces; as a result the effective applied load on the particles and consequently wear rate decrease. Secondly, the abrasive breakdown to very small particles along with high forces applied has the potential of embedding the particles into the surface of the test specimen. This embedment in the test piece reduces the roughness of the surface by lling the surface asperities and may subsequently act to reduce the observed wear rate by hardening the surface; however, it has been reported that silica has low tendencies for embedment in comparison to the other abrasives [14]. Therefore, the embedment effect is expected to be more severe for softer metals, harder abrasives and abrasives which have a more tendency for embedding such as alumina. In studying the inuence of abrasive fracture in high-stress abrasive wear, Dube and Hutchings noticed when larger silica particles (425500 m) were used as abrasive; wear rate was signicantly higher than when smaller silica particles (125150 m) were used under similar test conditions [1]. This increase in the wear rate intensied at higher forces up to 45 times while in this case breakage increased only by 1.52 times. The important conclusion drawn from this observation (even though they did not mention it themselves) is that other than having less tendency to break, smaller particles are worse abradents inheritably. Fig. 9 depicts a schematic representation of the different zones on the wear scar observed in our experiments. In the very high force regime, most of the abrasive particles get broken down to tiny particles as soon as they enter the wear scar. Therefore, over the rest of their journey in the contact zone, they are not as efcient as larger particles in abrading the material. It is interesting to note that the very high levels of fragmentation and the resulting particle size effect has been mentioned as one of the two main reasons for justifying an anomalous wear behavior similar to our case [20]. Fig. 10 represents surface area density of the metal particles as a function of the applied force between wheel and the specimen. Surface area density increases, though in a limited range, with increasing the applied force. The energy expended on the removal of the material is proportional to the generated metal surfaces from a fracture mechanics viewpoint. Therefore, the product of the volume loss and surface area density is proportional to this so-called wear energy. It should be noted that the amount of generated metal surface area is only an indication of the energy trend, not its absolute value; because the fracture surface energy has not been taken

Created surface area in the sand (m2)

Wear (cm )

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695

Fig. 9. Different zones on the wear scar [1].

into account. Given the applied torque on the shaft and knowing rotation speed of the wheel, the input energy is readily calculated using Eq. (4). Fig. 11 shows the normalized ratio of wear to input energy along with the normalized abrasive breakage, as a function

of the applied force. It is of interest that these two diagrams have more or less the same trend meaning both diagrams have a maximum at 200 N and then start decreasing with an increase in the applied load. This high degree of similarity in the trend of these graphs conrms the strong correlation between abrasive breakage and wear rate of the metal, previously discussed, this time from an energy viewpoint. The second set of the experiments is conducted for several rotation speeds while the applied load is kept constant at a low force regime (120 N) in order to avoid the nonlinear behaviors caused by applying higher forces. To have a better idea of the variations, the diagrams are plotted in a similar range as the plots presented for the effect of applied load. Fig. 12 shows the volume loss of the specimen as a function of the rotational speed of the wheel. As seen, wear does not change with an increase in the rotational speed while one may expect a higher wear rate since higher rotation speed is expected to increase the wear path length. Such an expectation may be true in a two-body abrasion process; however, the behavior of the abrasive particles between the wheel and sample further complicates the issue in the three-body abrasion. In this case, only an increase in the sliding of the abrasive particles would effectively increase the wear path length while rolling of the particles does not have a signicant impact in increasing the wear path length. Fig. 13 shows the amount of the abrasive fragmentation, surface area change, versus the rotation speed of the wheel. Given the close relation between wear rate and breakage of the abrasive particles discussed earlier, it is no surprise that the abrasive fragmentation, similar to

Wear particles surface area density (m /g)

0.14
1.1

0.12
1.0

Wear (cm )

0.10 0.08 0.06 0.04

0.9

0.8

0.7

100

200

300

400

500

600

0.02

Applied force (N)

Fig. 10. Surface area density of wear particles versus applied force.

140

150

160

170

180

190

Rotation speed (rpm)

Fig. 12. Wear rate versus rotation/sliding speed.

Wear/input energy ratio Breakage energy

1.0

Created surface area of sand (m )

3.0

Normalized energy

0.8

2.5

2.0

0.6

1.5

0.4

1.0

0.2

100

200

300

400

500

600

0.5

140

150

160

170

180

19 0

Applied force (N)

Fig. 11. Breakage and wear/input energy versus applied force.

Rotation speed (rpm)

Fig. 13. Surface area change of abrasive versus rotation/sliding speed.

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the wear rate, is not much affected by the rotation speed of the wheel. The facts that increasing the rotation speed caused an increase in neither wear rate nor abrasive breakage shows the effective wear path length and the applied load on each particle are not affected by the wheel motion speed, at least in this rotational speed range. In our experimental setup, abrasive particles have a certain ow rate and speed controlled by gravitational force, sand nozzle span and size distribution of the initial feed. When the linear speed of the wheel at the contact point is less than abrasive ow speed, the discrepancy in speeds prevents the abrasive ow from getting into the abrasion zone in effect, and consequently wear rate may be affected. But at rotational speeds higher than the abrasive ow speed, which seems to be our case, wheel rotation speed does not inuence the abrasive ow rate much. The results within this rotation speed range indicate motion of the abrasive particles may be slightly affected by the variations of the rotation speed; but, the breakage of the abrasive particles and wear rate are mostly affected by the applied force on each particle. It should be noted that even inuencing the motion of abrasive particles is questioned due to inability of steel wheel in carrying the sand particles effectively. In the end, since rotation speed of the wheel does not have a noticeable effect on parameters of interest, the rest of diagrams are not presented for the rotation speed effect. Because of the previously mentioned reasons, only one material was used in this stage of the research; and consequently, the effect of hardness is not discussed here. Nevertheless, the effect of hardness and various microstructures on the wear rate is well studied in the past [9]. The effect of hardness on the abrasive fragmentation, especially for the steel wheel, needs to be further investigated; however, in the case of the rubber wheel, it is suggested that particle fragmentation is not much affected by the hardness of the specimen [20]. 6. Conclusions In a summary, the objectives of this paper were underlining the signicance of the combined study of wear and abrasive fragmentation, exploring possible correlation between these two phenomena, and proposing novel tools for quantifying both abrasive fragmentation and wear. The Steel Wheel Abrasion Test was proven to be a suitable experimental setup which can be applied in the combined study of wear and abrasive breakage due to the provision of a high-stress wear environment. This high-stress wear environment accompanies with remarkable breakage of the abrasive akin to the situation occurring in some industrial applications such as rock crushers or comminution devices. The quantity and quality of the abrasive fragmentation was measured through screening the sand following the test and estimating the created surface area in the abrasive. This estimation is believed to be a more precise criterion for evaluation of the abrasive fragmentation than previously known methods and was used to justify the nonlinear wear behavior with an increase in the applied load observed in the past. The wear particles collected from the sand following the test helped to indicate a strong correlation between the abrasive fragmentation and wear, this time from an energy view-

point. Further investigation of the specication of wear particles may additionally provide the basis for studies aiming at linking the abrasive wear to the fracture mechanics principals and probably throw light on the mechanism of the wear. In this paper, the effect of the test variables, applied load between the specimen and the wheel and rotational speed of the wheel, on the parameters of the interest were investigated. The variations of the applied load had a signicant effect on the wear, abrasive fragmentation and other parameters while no such sensitivity was observed to the variations of the rotational speed. The abrasive wear models which the author is aware of neglect abrasive fragmentation and consequently fall short in justifying some phenomena such as nonlinear behaviors of the wear rate with variations of the applied force. These primary results, which show a strong link between abrasive fragmentation and the wear rate, suggest the necessity of introducing more thorough abrasive wear equations that quantitatively takes the particle fragmentation on board and link it to the volume loss of the material. The generated surface area in the abrasive may be used as one of the parameters quantifying the abrasive fragmentation in the wear equations to be developed. References
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