Question

Bit of a different question, but i am doing a small project to do with compacting Swarf from mills/lathes etc into briquettes to save space and to extract any coolant. I cannot find any information to do with the force required to compact aluminium/steel swarf. Are there any calculations or rough estimates on the force to compact metal swarf? Any standard steel or aluminium for example would be fine, i did find the density of aluminium swarf is 0.25g/cm^3 if thats any use. And the compaction ratio id like is 1:4. I just can't find anything to even get a rough idea, any helps greatly appreciated. Thankyou

Answer 1

Metals are elastic materials having very high Young's modulus. So, the force required them to break is also large.

The minimum stress required to break the solid is known as tensile strength. For Aluminium, it has a range of 124–290 MPa. (Young's modulus = 68.9 GPa).

So, the stress should be applied must be more than 290 MPa. Now we can convert it to the force,

force = stress * area

here area is the area of the metal (Al).

[Now, we can see Young's modulus is higher than the tensile strength. This is because it is the ratio of stress to the strain. And the value of strain is always less than 1 in the elastic limit.]