Wear assessment of the WC/Co cemented carbidetricone drillbits in an open pit mine

In rock drilling, the most important characteristic to clarify is the wear of the drill bits. The reason that the rock drill bits fail with time is wear. In dry sliding contact adhesive wear deteriorates the materials in contact, quickly, and is the result of shear fracture in the momentary contact joins between the surfaces. This paper aims at presenting an overview of the assessment of WC/Co cemented carbide (CC) tricone bit in rotary drilling. To study wear of these bits, two approaches have been used in this research. Firstly, the new bits were weighted before they mounted on the drill rigs and also after completion their useful life to obtain bit weight loss percentage. The characteristics of the rock types drilled by using such this bit were measured, simultaneously. Alternatively, to measure contact wear, namely, matrix wear a micrometer has been used with a resolution of 0.02 mm at different direction on the tricone bits. Equivalent quartz content (EQC), net quartz content (QC), muscovite content (Mu), coarseness index (CI) of drill cuttings and compressive strength of rocks (UCS) were obtained along with thin sections to investigate mineralogical properties in detail. The correlation between effective parameters and bit wear were obtained as result of this study. It was observed that UCS shows no significant correlation with bit wear. By increasing CI and cutting size of rocks wear of bit increases.