There is a curious discipline within engineering, that the best component is the one that is designed to lose. Not to fail in a random and unfortunate manner, but to absorb damage in a predictable manner. The rest of the system then can operate without incident. This is an old concept in the discipline of engineering.
In 1824 Humphry Davy successfully managed to get the Royal Navy to agree to fix zinc and iron plates to the copper hulls of their warships. The zinc and iron would corrode preferentially and thus take the electrochemical corrosion current away from the hull, which was made of copper. This is the first true sacrificial anode application. It was cheap and could be replaced when it had worn out, thus saving the valuable hull from premature corrosion.
Later NASA was to take the same approach with the ablative heat shields on the re-entry vehicles of its astronauts. The surface of the re-entry vehicle was covered with layers of material that were designed to char, to erode, to carry heat away from the inner surface of the vehicle. They were designed to destroy themselves in a controlled manner, and to do that on a predetermined time scale so that the astronauts inside the vehicle would not be harmed. There is a useful background explanation of Humphry Davy’s work on electrochemical protection. For Wear Resistant Linings, visit https://www.kingfisher-industrial.com/wear-protection/.
This same principle of sacrificial wear is often incorporated into the design of mill, hopper and chute wear surfaces. The key component here that requires engineering design is the wear surface or liner. This surface is designed to wear in a controlled fashion. The steel vessel that contains it is the critical component. If the liner fails prematurely, it is a maintenance problem. If the liner becomes welded to the internal surfaces of the vessel it can become just as costly to remove as a worn out vessel. The designer must ensure that the controlled failure of the liner material is a real controlled failure and not an uncontrolled failure.
Wear resistant linings are the industrial implementation of this concept – design a material to last for as long as required, and then fail in a predetermined fashion rather than in an uncontrolled manner.