A method has been published by Hanson et al. [7] to use results from a rotary erosion tester [8] to predict bend wear rates in real conveyor bends. This is important industrially, because a rotary erosion test is very cheap and quick to undertake, also it is highly repeatable and uses a small quantity of material which can be characterized accurately; by comparison, a trial on a full size conveyor is extremely costly, usually requiring many cubic metres of particulates. An incorrect choice of erosion-resistant material for a bend can result in large warranty claims against the
system supplier if the bends wear out too quickly, or excessive expenses in construction if an unnecessarily high grade of wear resistant material is specified. However, a shortfall in the prediction method is that the different magnitude of shielding between the erosion tester and the bend ( for a given particle concentration), was not fully accounted for in Hanson’s model. In fact The level of shielding in the erosion tester is low and in case can be established quickly and cheaply in the test, so the erosion rate as concentration tends to zero can be determined conveniently from the erosion tester. The challenge then lies in having a reliable model to scale this erosion rate under low concentration, to an accurate erosion rate at the adequate concentration in the industrial conveyor design. Whilst the published studies have
shown the trend,all have used only fine sand as the erodent, so the dependence of the shielding on the particle properties needs to be explored more thoroughly to see whether the same rate of decay holds.