The cone crusher is an indispensable equipment in complex ore mineral processing and a variant of the cone crusher is the inertia cone crusher. A real-time dynamic model based on the multibody dynamic and discrete element method is established to analyze the performance of the inertia cone crusher. This model considers an accurate description of the mechanical motions, the nonlinear contact, and the ore material loading response. Especially the calibration of ore material simulated parameters is based on the Taguchi method for the Design of Experiments. For model verification, the industrial-scale experiment was conducted on a GYP1200 inertia cone crusher. Two different drive speeds were included in the experiments, and the testing devices were used to acquire crusher performances, for instance, displacement amplitude, power draw, product size distribution, and throughput capacity in order to accurately compare simulation results. The preliminary model can be qualitatively evaluated the flow pattern of particles and quantitatively evaluated the crushing force distribution in the concave. Furthermore, the simulation predicts the variety of crusher performances using the drive speed and the fixed cone mass as input variables. The simulation model provides novel insight regarding the improvement of linings wear period, lowering manufacturing cost, and obtaining optimal operation parameters.

Inertia cone crushers are widely used in complex ore mineral processing. The two mass variables (fixed cone mass and moving cone mass) affect the dynamic performance of the inertia cone crusher. Particularly the operative crushing force of the moving cone and the amplitude of the fixed cone are affected, and thus the energy consumption of the crusher. In this paper, the process of crushing steel slag is taken as a specific research object, to analyze the influence of two mass variables on the inertia cone crusher performance. A real-time dynamic model based on the multi-body dynamic (MBD) and the discrete element method (DEM) is established. Furthermore, the influence of the fixed cone mass and moving cone mass on the operative crushing force, amplitude and average power draw are explored by the design of simulation experiments. The predictive regression models of inertia cone crusher performance are obtained using response surface methodology (RSM). After increasing the fixed cone mass, the optimized amplitude, average power and moving cone mass are decreased by 37.1%, 33.1% and 10%, respectively, compared to without the adjustment. Finally, a more effective dynamic balancing mechanism of inertia cone crusher is achieved, which can utilize the kinetic energy of a balancer, and minimize the mass of the fixed and moving cone. The fixed cone mass and moving cone mass of a balancing crusher are decreased by 78.9% and 22.8%, respectively, compared to without the balancing mechanism.