Iron ore pellets are sintered, centimetre-sized spheres of ore with high iron content. Together with carbonized coal, iron ore pellets are used in the production of steel. In the transportation from the pelletizing plants to the customers, the iron ore pellets are exposed to different stresses, resulting in degradation of strength and in some cases fragmentation. For future reliable numerical simulations of the handling and transportation of iron ore pellets, knowledge about their mechanical properties is needed. This paper describes the experimental and numerical work to investigate the mechanical properties of blast furnace iron ore pellets. To study the load deformation behavior and the fracture of iron ore pellets, a number of point load tests are carried out and analyzed. Material parameters for an elastic-plastic constitutive model with linear hardening for iron ore pellets are derived and expressed in terms of statistical means and standard deviations. Two finite element models are developed for different purposes. For the material parameter determination, a perfectly spherical model is used. The constitutive model is validated with a finite element model based on a representative optically scanned iron ore pellet. The proposed constitutive model is capturing the force displacement relation for iron ore pellets in a two-point load test. A stress based fracture criterion which takes the triaxiality into account is suggested and calculated as the maximum equivalent effective stress dependent on the three principal stresses at fracture. The results of this study show that the equivalent effective stress in the vicinity of the centre of an irregular model of an iron ore pellet is very close to the results of a model of a perfectly spherical iron ore pellet. The proposed fracture criterion indicates fracture in the representative iron ore pellet model coincident with the location of the crack developed during the test of the optically scanned iron ore pellet. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.