Chemical Engineering Department

Mechanical unit operations

Industrial size Reduction Equipments
 Size Reduction Machines
 Solids may be broken in many different ways, but only four of
them are commonly used in size-reduction machines:
Compression (course reduction of hard solids)
Impact (gives course, medium or fine products)
Attrition (rubbing) (gives very fine products from soft, non
abrasive materials)
Cutting (gives definitive particle size & shape, with few or
no fines)
 An ideal crusher or grinding would:
Have a large capacity.
Require a small power input per unit of product.
Yield a product of single size or the size distribution desired.
 Cont’d
 The choice of machine selected for a particular grinding
operation will depend on the following variables:
Stressing mechanisms
Size of feed & product
Material properties
Carrier medium
Mode of operation
Capacity combination with other unit operations.
 Stressing Mechanisms
 It is possible to identify three stresses mechanisms responsible for particle
size reduction in mills:
Cont’d
Cont’d
Crushers Breaks large pieces of solid materials into smaller lumps
Primary crusher Reduce to 150-250mm
Secondary crushers Reduce to 6mm
Grinders Reduce crushed feed to powder
Intermediate grinder Reduce to pass 40 mesh screen
Fine grinder Reduce to pass 200mesh screen
Ultra fine grinder Accepts 6mm or less particles & reduce to 1–50m
Cutters Reduce to 2 to 10mm in length

Machines Type Of Mechanism

Crushers Compression
Grinding Impact + Attrition + Compression
Ultrafine grinders Attrition
cutters Cutting
Examples

A. Crushers: C. Ultrafine grinders

 Jaw crushers
 Hammer mills with
 Gyratory crushers
internal classification
 Crushing rolls
 Fluid-energy mills
B. Grinders  Agitated mills
 Hammer mills
 Rolling-compression mills D. Cutting machines:
 Attrition mills  Knife cutters
 Tumbling mills
 Dicers
 Ball mills
 Slitters
Jaw Crusher

Jaw Crusher
Gyratory Crusher
Gyratory crusher(schematic diagram)
 Characteristics
The speed of the crushing head is typically 125 to 425
gyrations per minute
The discharge from a gyratory is continuous
The load on the motor is nearly uniform
Less maintenance is required than with jaw crusher
The power requirement per ton of material crushed is
smaller
The biggest gyratory handle up to 4500ton/hr
Capacity is almost independent of the compressive
strength the material being crushed
The capacity of gyratory crusher varies with the
– Jaw setting, impact strength of the feed, speed of gyration
Crushing Roll
 Cont’d
 Particles of feed caught b/n the rolls are broken in compression & drop
out below.
 Typically rolls are 600mm in diameter.
 Their speed range from 50 to 300 rev/min.
 They are secondary crushers, with feeds 12 to 75mm in size & products
12mm to 1mm.
 The roll crusher is widely used in middle and small sized mines for
intermediate and fine crashing of the brittle and soft ores of intermediate
hardness like coal and coke.
 Roller mill (Schematic diagram)

Example:
Widely used in diverse stages of cereal grinding
 size reduction of minerals such as calcite and
kaolin, and
ceramic materials such as magnetite, zircon sand,
silicon carbide, and so on
Ball Mill
Ball mill (schematic diagram)
Cont’d
 Ball mill is an efficient tool for grinding materials like
o ores, chemicals, ceramic raw materials , paints etc. in to fine
powder or fine paste by grinding in a wet way.
 Material fed through the mill is crushed by impact and
grounded by attrition between the ballsand also the
internal cascading effect reduce the material in to a
fine powder.
 The rotation of the powder mixer is usually b/n 4 to 20
rev/minute, depending upon the diameter of the mill.
 The larger the diameter is, the slower the rotation will be.
 Ball mills are generally used to grind material ¼" and finer,
down to the particle size of 20 - 75microns.
Cont’d
Size Range Of Product Term Used
1 – 0.1m Course crushing
0.1m Crushing
1cm Fine crushing, course grinding
1mm Intermediate grinding
100m Fine grinding
10m Ultrafine grinding
 Types of Milling Circuits
 Milling circuits are either ‘open circuit’ or ‘closed circuit’. In open circuit
milling (Figure below) the material passes only once through the mill, and
so the only controllable variable is the residence time of the material in
the mill.
 Cont’d
 In closed circuit milling (Figure below) the material leaving the mill is
subjected to some form of classification (separation according to particle
size) with the oversize being returned to the mill with the feed material.
 Such a system is far more flexible since both product mean size and size
distribution may be controlled.
Dry Milling
Wet Milling
Hammer mill
• Can handle a wide variety of materials from hard and
abrasive to fibrous and sticky.

Fineness is controlled by
-size of holes in screen
-Rpm
-Rate of feed/or rate of beat
Hammer mill
• The most versatile type of comminution equipment.
• Consists of heavy blocks of steel (in the form of hammers)
that are pinned along the periphery of a rotating disc called
rotor that rotates at high rpm inside housing.
• The hammers deliver heavy blows to a feed rock driving it
against a breaker plate until it fine enough to pass through a
bottom mounted screen by gravity when the particles attain a
proper size.
• Reduction is mainly due to impact forces and Attrition forces
can also play a part in such reduction.
Fluid Energy mill
Fluid Energy mill
• Grinding is achieved by collision between the particles being ground
and the energy supplied by compressed fluid (air or superheated
steam) entering grinding chamber at high speed.
• A fluid usually air is injected at high pressure through the nozzles
at the bottom of the loop giving rise to a high velocity circulation in
very turbulent condition.
• Solids are introduced in to the stream and as a result of high degree
of forces occur between particles so that particles are retained until
sufficiently fine particles are obtained.
• A common form of fluid energy mill is the loop or oval jet mill
shown in Figure .
Knife cutters
• cutting machine can be used when feed is :
– too tenacious (sticky) or
– too resilient (elastic) to be broken by compression, impact, or
attrition like rubbers, plastics, or leaves of vegetables and spices.
• The knife cutters have a very similar design to the hammer
mills
 Example
A material consisting originally of 25mm particles is crushed to an average
size of 7mm and requires 20 kJ/kg for this size reduction. Determine the
energy required to crush the material from 25mm to 3.5mm assuming
A. (Rittinger’s law,
B. (b) Kick’s law and
C. Bond’s law.
Cont’d