Investigating the Influences of Indentation Hardness and Brittleness of Rock-Like Material on Its Mechanical Crushing Behaviors

Indentation hardness and brittleness are the important factors to be considered in the study of rock-like materials’ mechanical crushing behaviors. The brittleness of rock-like materials is defined as the ratio of uniaxial compressive strength to tensile strength in this paper. In order to investigate the influences of hardness and brittleness on rock-like materials’ crushing behaviors, quartz sand and high strength α -hemi-hydrated gypsum were used to prepare rock-like materials with different hardness and brittleness through different mass ratios. The artificial rock-like materials can eliminate the effects of natural rock’s weak structure plane on experimental results. The indentation test, Uniaxial compressive test, and Brazilian tensile test were conducted for characterizing the indentation hardness and brittleness of this artificial rock-like materials. The experimental results showed that brittleness increased with the increase of indentation hardness with high correlation coefficient. The confining stress presented a positive impact on the indentation hardness of the rock-like materials. Based on those mechanical properties, the numerical rock models were calculated to study rock crushing behaviors using discrete element method (DEM). A series of rock crushing tests were conducted to investigate the influences of hardness and brittleness of rock-like materials on rock crushing behaviors using a conical pick cutter. The numerical results showed that the normalized specific energy was negatively correlated with indentation hardness index (IHI). The normalized specific energy decreased with the increase of brittleness index (BI) with a high correlation coefficient. This study is beneficial in utilizing IHI and BI to evaluate the mechanical properties, failure patterns, and mechanical crushing efficiency of rock-like materials.