Semi-Mechanistic Modelling of Fracture Mechanisms of Engineered Artificial Minerals

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The importance of complex high-tech products, for example in the fields of energy storage as well as sensor technology, life science and human health, is increasing rapidly. The associated increasing complexity of material composites and function-integrated components poses even greater challenges regarding closed material cycles and, thus, making valuable raw materials permanently available, e.g. in electro mobility. This is especially true in the area of metallic materials and rare earths, which often accumulate within a pyrometallurgical treatment in the form of slags with an unclear, widely distributed material composition. The different material compositions, phase interactions, crystallite and particle sizes and morphologies pose great challenges for the selective comminution and subsequent separation of the individual material phases. Due to the complex composition of the EnAM particles, the model approaches developed in the last decades for the description of the breakage mechanisms of natural minerals and homogeneous synthetic materials as well as the individual process unit models are no longer sufficient. The logical consequence of this is that new breakage and strength models have to be developed especially for multi-component EnAM particles depending on the complex phase composition and structural parameters (e.g. crystallite and particle sizes and particle morphologies). This task and the associated challenge of detailed structure elucidation and defined mechanical loading of the EnAM particles is addressed by this proposed project. In detail, models for the breakage probability rate, respectively, and multi-variate breakage function as well as mechanical deformation behavior and strength of the individual particles are to be determined and implemented in a discrete element simulation environment (DEM) and flowsheet simulation (DynSim, in the second funding period) to predict different comminution processes.