Study Of Particles Flow Over Industrial Wobbler Type Feeder Using Discrete Element Method

Abstract

Wobbler feeders are generally used to feed coarse material to the primary crusher in the mine and aggregate applications. In the operation, finer particles are also screened through the spaces among rollers and wobbling of the rocks through the roller cause impact and rubbing effect that helps to move undesired particle over batches. Motion of the materials on the feeder depends on design parameters such as roller size, rotation speed, spacing etc. and also gradation of the bulk material that fed into the feeder. The performance investigation of the feeder heavily relies on experimental studies due to complex motion of the material on the feeder as well as particle interaction in the batch. Discrete Element Method is a method that used to compute motion of large number of particles in a granular flow and it is widely accepted as an effective method in the rock mechanics. In this study, DEM is used to investigate the performance of a wobbler feeder. The feeder is designed and simulated for different parameters such as spacing, roller speed, particle shape and gradation in The Rocky DEM software. The particle velocities and trajectories were determined, and particle resident times were calculated to investigate the efficiency of the feeder for different disc configurations.