A fundamental investigation on the breakage of a bed of silica sand particles: An attainable region approach

In this article, the breakage behavior of a bed of silica particles is tested to identify optimum operating parameters to get products in three different previously defined particle size classes. This is done by drop weight tests with steel balls of different sizes (10, 20 and 30 mm) from different heights (up to 2.0 m). Many different techniques have been adopted in comminution in order to find ways of optimizing energy consumption in the size reduction process. In this paper, we apply one such method called the Attainable Region (AR) analysis technique to optimize the impact energy on a bed of silica particles. The attainable region is a fundamental approach that is equipment-independent and can be used to analyze breakage processes. The AR is defined as a set of all possible outcomes, for the system under consideration that can be achieved using fundamental processes operating within the system. The main finding of the article is that the 20 mm steel ball leads to a maximum yield in the intermediate size class.