SANTOS, E. M. B. Experimental evaluation of the fracture and erosion behavior of antierosive refractory castable . 2012. 124f Tese (Doutorado em Ciências), Escola de Engenharia de Lorena,Universidade de São Paulo, Lorena, São Paulo, 2012. Castables materials are known to be formed by a complex microstructure containing a fine fraction known as matrix (D<100µm) and another one known as aggregate containing thicker particles up to centimeters in size. Among its most notable properties regarding

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... plication, this research primarily addresses to the fracture energy and its erosion resistance. In recent years, some studies have been performed concerning such assessments. As an example, the wedge splitting procedure has been applied in the stable crack propagation method used for some thicker structured materials evaluation such the castables ones. On the other hand, a few data have been gathered concerning castable's erosion resistance. Facing such applications the main goal was the study of conventional aluminous anti erosive castables once it has been used in the petrochemical industry in order to correlate fracture energy and erosion resistance results. On this research, two castables samples with the same chemical composition were tested differing only its aggregate particle grain sizes. Besides fracture energy and erosion resistance, other important properties were evaluated as following: elastic modulus, rupture modulus, apparent porosity, crystalline phases and a castable matrix study was also carried out. The results demonstrate an increase on fracture energy as the studied castable aggregate size also increases and according to images studied, the erosion resistance suffers another increment regarding the thermal treatment temperature increase due matrix ceramization. Based on the obtained results, it can be concluded that no observation was made regarding the fracture energy and erosion resistance but it may exist an energy correlation between them once there is some observed between the characteristic length and the erosion resistance concerning the aggregate size range.