Impact of physical and mechanical properties of rocks on energy consumption of jaw crusher

The aim of this paper was to determine the impact of physical and mechanical properties of rocks on the electricity consumption of a jaw crusher during crushing. This paper presents a different approach to determine the energy consumption during comminution. The energy required for crushing rocks was obtained by direct measurement of crusher's motor power during the crushing of samples. Laboratory tests were used to determine the following physical and mechanical properties of the tested samples: bulk density, compressive strength, tensile strength, hardness, and fracture toughness. After that, the laboratory jaw crusher crushing tests were conducted. In the first part of the study, the individual rock samples were crushed one by one. In the second part of the test, multiple samples were crushed simultaneously. By measuring the energy consumption for crushing rocks with different physical and mechanical properties, we explored the dependence of energy required for crushing on individual mechanical properties of rocks and the simultaneous effect of the properties. Using statistical analysis of the influence of individual mechanical properties we found that the greatest influence on energy consumption for crushing was compressive strength. Fracture toughness and tensile strength of the rocks had a significant impact on the crushing energy. The effect of bulk density was not large while for the hardness could not be stated that it had influence. By the analysis of deviations of specific crushing energy calculated using equations obtained by multiple regression analysis of simultaneous influence of multiple mechanical properties of rocks and from the measured values, it was found that the dependence obtained on the basis of all investigated properties showed the smallest deviation and dependence obtained by compressive strength, fracture toughness, and hardness showed significantly smaller deviation. By examining the influence of mechanical rock properties on particle size of crushed material it was found that the increase in compressive strength increased the proportion of larger particles while other properties showed no effect.