The causes of failure of the tangential rotary cutter bits of the road header during stonedrift in rocks of medium strength are analyzed in the article. It was revealed that the most typical cause of failure of cutter bits is premature wear of the toolholder (body) of the cutter bit. It is well known that the most effective way to improve the wear resistance is to increase hardness. The influence of the thermomechanical treatment of the material of the cutter bit toolholder on its hardness is studied. It was established that the thermomechanical treatment of the cutter bit toolholder material results in the increase of its hardness. It was found that the increase of material hardness is proportional to the increase of material strain intensity during thermomechanical treatment. It was concluded that the use of thermomechanical treatment can lead to the increase of both the hardness and wear resistance of the cutter bit material.

The problem of DEM models calibration is considered in the article. It is proposed to divide models input parameters into those that require iterative calibration and those that are recommended to measure directly. A new method for model calibration based on the design of the experiment for iteratively calibrated parameters is proposed. The experiment is conducted using a specially designed stand. The results are processed with technical vision algorithms. Approximating functions are obtained and the error of the implemented software and hardware complex is estimated. The prospects of the obtained results are discussed.

In this study, we utilized multiphase computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and discrete element method (DEM). Effect of the kinetic parameters of the roasting process in a fluidized bed was investigated. Our results indicate that it is possible to numerically integrate the coupled CFD-DEM system without significantly increasing computational overhead. It is also clear, however, that reactor operating conditions, reaction kinetics, and multiphase flow dynamics have major impacts on the roasting products exiting the reactor. We find that, with the same pre-exponential factors and mean activation energies, inclusion of distributed activation energies in the kinetics can shift the predicted average value of the exit gas-solidphase and its statistical distribution, compared to single-valued activation-energy kinetics. These findings imply that accurate resolution of the reaction activation energy distributions will be important for optimizing roasting processes.