The correlation of material characteristics and wear in a laboratory scale cone crusher

Wear of materials is a widely recognised industrial problem. The direct costs of wear failures, such as wear part replacements, loss of productivity as well as indirect losses of energy, and the increased environmental burden, are real problems in everyday work and business. The mineral industry is particularly susceptible to wear part consumption resulting in high expenses. In this study, the performance of various steel-based wear resistant powder metallurgical metal matrix composites (MMCs) was studied for mineral industry applications. The matrix of the composites consisted of various tool steels, manganese steel and martensitic steel and the reinforcements used were tungsten carbides (WC), titanium carbides (TiC) or cemented carbides (WC/Co). Hot isostatic pressing (HIP) was used for compacting the materials. The performance of composite materials was studied in a laboratory scale cone crusher wear test. Correlations between the wear behaviour and microstructure parameters, such as volume fraction and the size of the hard particles and spacing between hard particles were investigated. It was found that the most important parameters in this wear environment were the total volume fraction of the hard phase and the type of the hard phase. A necessary feature of the matrix material is that it is also resistant to abrasion.