Modeling the movement of material along the rough surface of a mixer blade installed above a moving conveyor belt

Abstract

The main methods of preparing the metallurgical charge for its further use today include the operation of mixing various materials with different granular composition to obtain a homogeneous mixture. For the preparation of metallurgical charge in the mining and metallurgical industry, continuous action mixers are used, which, unlike batch mixers, have a number of significant advantages, such as high productivity and the possibility of fully automating the process of preparing the necessary mixture. The well-known designs of mixers used in the preparation of metallurgical charge include drum, screw and rotary mixers. Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to rotary mixers, because they are the best among the mixers used in the preparation of metallurgical charge in terms of their main characteristics - productivity and energy consumption. But in a number of cases, rotary mixers do not meet the technological conditions for the preparation of a high-quality mixture. Therefore, increasing its efficiency when preparing the metallurgical charge for sintering or remelting requires a deeper analysis of the operation of the blade rotor, working in conjunction with the movement of the conveyor belt installed above it. Such analysis and research would allow to improve the mixing process to obtain a high-quality mixture of mineral raw materials when using a rotary mixer installed above a moving conveyor belt. Therefore, works aimed at establishing ways of improving this type of equipment are very interesting and relevant today. The paper describes the movement of material particles along the rough surface of the rotor blade of the mixer, which rotates in a layer of loose material transported simultaneously on the conveyor belt, and analyzed which main parameters affect the quality of the mixture preparation. As a result of research, a mathematical model was obtained for a horizontally-directed mixer with rotor cable elements that bring the material layer into a suspended state, which describes the influence of design and mode parameters on the nature of the movement of material particles in a pseudo-viscous medium. It was established that the nature of the movement of particles moving along with the conveyor belt can be considered stable.