A Thermo-Elastic Coupling Analysis of Conical Picks Using the Smoothed Finite Element Method for Wear Prediction in Rock Cutting

As a critical component of a roadheader, the performance of the pick directly affects operational efficiency in mining and tunneling. Thermo-elastic coupling is found to influence the wear characteristics of conical picks. In this paper, an effective thermo-elastic coupling model was proposed for numerical thermomechanical analysis in conical picks. Based on a simple linear tetrahedral mesh, three S-FEM models including ES-FEM, NS-FEM and FS-FEM were implemented using different smoothing strategies with gradient smoothing operations on the temperature gradient and displacement gradient to obtain accurate solutions. Detailed verification studies were conducted using the standard finite element method (FEM) results, with dense mesh as reference solutions. The results show that ES-FEM significantly reduces the computational errors of temperature, displacement and stress under the same meshing conditions, which errors are only 17%, 16% and 34% of FEM, respectively. In addition, the numerical displacement results were used to predict the wear of picks made of three materials under given conditions. It is found that the minimum error in the ES-FEM prediction is only one–seventh of that found in FEM. These findings underscore ES-FEM as a robust numerical simulation tool for predicting conical pick wear under actual conditions. Finally, comparisons of thermo-elastic coupling, static, and dynamic analyses were also conducted. The results indicate that temperature significantly influences pick wear than mechanical forces.