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Effect of grinding media shape on ball milling performance

Nousia Olga

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Summary

Grinding is one of the most fundamental processes in the field of mineral beneficiation and has long attracted the interest of researchers, primarily due to its high energy demand. It aims at reducing the particle size of raw materials, but this size reduction comes at a significant energy cost. The required energy depends on a wide range of interacting variables, making the grinding process complex and challenging to optimize.The pursuit of energy consumption reduction in grinding operations is crucial, as it enhances energy efficiency and simultaneously lowers the processing cost per unit mass of material. For this reason, optimizing the performance of ball mills and investigating the factors that affect their efficiency remains an active area of research.In this diploma thesis, the influence of the shape of grinding media on the performance of a ball mill was investigated, using a copper sulfide ore from the Yukon region of Canada as the feed material. Specifically, the study focused on how energy consumption is affected by the type of grinding media (conventional balls and alternative Relo/RGM media), the feed size, grinding time, and mill rotation speed.Additionally, the breakage rate (min⁻¹) of the feed fractions was evaluated, and the amount of product passing below 300 μm was quantified under various grinding conditions. For the experiments, three feed size fractions were prepared (-6.7+3.35 mm, -3.35+1.7 mm, and -1.7+0.850 mm), and grinding tests were conducted using both media types, for three time intervals (0.5, 1, and 2 minutes), and at three rotation speeds (50, 60, and 70 rpm).The results showed that increasing the rotation speed led to finer product sizes with lower energy consumption, regardless of the media type. The shape of the grinding media significantly affected both the breakage rate and the energy efficiency of the process. Overall, conventional balls demonstrated better performance in most cases. However, Relo media proved to be a viable alternative under specific conditions, such as at lower rotational speeds and with finer feed sizes.

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