Mineral Processing

MMEE324
Dr. G. Danha
Lecture 3: Process Engineering of Size Reduction
Outline
• Introduction

• Design of Grinding Circuits

• Size reduction equipment

• Sample preparation equipment

• Size analysis equipment

• Worked examples
Learning outcomes for this unit

After completion of this chapter, you will be able to:

• Differentiate between crushing, grinding and milling

• Design a grinding circuit

• State and discuss the different techniques employed in the sizing of industrial scale
mills

• Evaluate the rate parameters of the population balance model

• Discuss the equipment used in size reduction, sample preparation and sample analysis.

• Calculate the energy required to reduce the size of a given feed to a desired product
size specification.
Introduction
• Comminution is important and applicable to many different types of
industries e.g. mineral processing, coal dressing, energy, foundry, etc.

• Surprisingly, this basic unit operation has over the years been given very little
attention especially when it comes to the circuit or process design aspects.

• This anomaly associated with the rather late development of guiding

principles resulted from a historical misconception in which comminution was
treated as a ‘black art’ and not a science.

• It used to be wrongly believed that the art of size reduction could only be
mastered after years and years of practice and not through studies
Introduction
• The theoretical basis governing comminution as a unit operation has many
similarities to that used in the design of reactors in chemical reaction
engineering.
• There are also similar terminologies and concepts used in both these fields
of process engineering
• The design of comminution circuits became the entry point and primary
purpose of process engineers in the rather conservative mineral processing
sector.
• Historically only mining engineers worked at the mines.
• With more appreciation of the scope of the processing duties, metallurgists
were then slowly entrusted and incorporated into the mining industry.
• The need to design, retrofit and optimize processing circuits led to the
opening up of opportunities for the process engineers to work in the mining
or mineral processing sector
Crushing
• Crushing is the first mechanical stage in the process of comminution in
which a principal objective is the liberation of the valuable minerals from
the gangue.
• Crushing is typically a dry operation that is performed in two or three
stages (i.e. primary, secondary and tertiary crushing).
• Lumps of run-of-mine ore as large as 1.5 m across are reduced in the
primary crushing stage to between 10 and 20 cm in heavy duty
machines.
• When primary crushing is performed underground it is normally the
responsibility of a mining engineer;
• for primary crushing at the surface it is customary for the mining
engineer to deliver the ore to the crusher and for the mineral processing
engineer to crush and handle the ore from this point through the
successive ore processing stages.
Grinding
• Grinding is the last stage in the comminution process where particles are reduced in
size by a combination of impact and abrasion, either dry, or more commonly, in
suspension in water.
• It is performed in cylindrical steel vessels that contain a charge of loose crushing
bodies (the grinding medium) that are free to move inside the mill, thus
comminuting the ore particles.
• According to the ways by which motion is imparted to the charge, grinding mills are
generally classified into two types:
• tumbling mills and stirred mills.
• In tumbling mills, the mill shell is rotated and motion is imparted to the charge via
the mill shell.
• The grinding media may be steel rods, balls, or rock itself. Media ball sizes, for
example, range from about 20 mm for fine grinding to 150 mm for coarse grinding.
 Grinding
•• Tumbling
  mills are typically employed in the mineral industry for primary grinding (i.e.
stage immediately after crushing), in which particles between 5 and 250 mm are reduced
in size to between 25 and 300 μm.
• In stirred mills, the mill shell is stationary mounted either horizontally or vertically and
motion is imparted to the charge by the movement of an internal stirrer.
• Grinding media (25 mm or less) inside the mill are agitated or rotated by the stirrer,
which typically comprises a central shaft to which are attached screws, pins, or discs of
various designs. Stirred mills find application in regrinding, fine (15 - 40 μm) and ultrafine
(15 μm) grinding.
• All ores have an economic optimum particle size which maximizes the difference
between net smelter return (NSR) and grinding costs:
• too coarse a grind and the inadequate liberation limits recovery (and thus revenue) in
the separation stage;
• too fine a grind and grinding costs exceed any increment in recovery (and may even
reduce recovery depending on the separation process).
• It is the purpose of the grinding section to exercise close control on this product size and,
for this reason, correct grinding is often said to be the key to good mineral processing.
Milling
• Milling also refers to the process of breaking down, separating, sizing or classifying

aggregate material.

• A mill is a device that breaks solid materials into smaller pieces by grinding,

crushing or cutting.

• There are many different types of mills and many types of materials processed in

them.

• Historically mills were powered by hand (e.g via a hand crank), working animal

(e.g. horse mill), wind (windmill) or water (watermill). Today they are usually

powered by electricity.
Design of Grinding Circuits
• The task of a process engineer in designing any type of a reactor is to
size the reactor for a required output rate of a desired quality of
product, using mass & energy balances, reaction kinetics,
thermodynamic data, etc.
• The engineer’s design must be able to allow for the input or
extraction of energy required for the reactions to take place and
should be able to minimise the amount of unreacted feed and the
side reactions or production of by-products.
• The resultant process must be safe, stable, controllable,
environmentally friendly and producing products that meet the
customer’s quality expectations or specifications.
• It should be able to efficiently meet its optimal design capacity with
minimal operating costs such as utilities, labour and raw materials.
Design of Grinding Circuits
• A similar approach applies to grinding mill design.
• If you take a look at the simplest type of mill known as a tumbling ball mill
(Figure 3.1),
• you will notice that a coarser feed material is fed into the mill, undergoes
the breakage action through interaction with tumbling grinding media and
finer product particle size distribution is obtained from the mill.
• The mill is treated as a reactor here in which the reaction achieved is size
reduction.
• A fundamental approach to basic mill circuit design is to size a mill that will
produce a desired product size distribution from a given feed.
• A correct choice of mill conditions such as rotational speed, ball size, ball
loading, interstitial filling and slurry density are essential in order to
optimize the process.
• Optimization in this context means minimizing capital expenditure while
maximizing production of the desired size class material.
Design of Grinding Circuits

Figure 3.1: Front view of a tumbling ball mill charged with slurry and grinding media.
Design of Grinding Circuits
• It is common practice when designing processing circuits to include a
by-pass, recycle and purge streams.
• Sometimes it might even be more appropriate to have the same
processing unit connected in series just so as to avoid the overload of
a single piece of equipment.
• In grinding circuit design, after the feed material has reduced its size in
the mill the different size classes exiting the mill must be separated.
• This step is known as classification, and it gives an indication of how
efficient the size reduction process was.
• Sieves, hydro cyclones or air cyclones are usually used to perform the
classification task.
• These units classify, separate or split the product into two streams
namely the oversize or overflow (coarser) material and the undersize
or underflow (finer) material.
 Design of Grinding Circuits
• The oversize material is then recycled to the mill for re-grinding
(Figure 3.2) while the undersize is fed to the next processing unit. An
optimum recycle ratio also needs to be specified.
Mill product
Classifier

Make up feed

Mill Q
G

recycle
T
Figure 3.2: Design of a grinding circuit
Design of Grinding Circuits
• One of the tasks of a design process engineer is to specify the best processing
route out of the many available options.

• More often than not, a designer has to choose between a circuit that contains
a primary crusher, secondary crusher, tertiary crusher, rod mill & ball mill
(Figure 3.3)

• and another that contains an autogenous mill sequence (Figure 3.4).

• The constituent units would have to be meticulously sized and cost estimated.

• A good choice of the processing route should always be supported by a

superior economic evaluation and analysis
Design of Grinding Circuits
Figure 3.3: Design option for a grinding
circuit. Figure 3.4: Design option for a grinding circuit.
Pit ore
 
Gyratory crusher pebble
Cyclone
overflow crusher
Concentra Cyclone
Crushed te
ore
(to Stockpile
grinding
SAG mill
circuit) Cyclone screen
underflow
Rod Ball Ball mill
Mill Sump Mill Sump
hopper
Design of Grinding Circuits
• The final design of a comminution circuit is a task that should be done after an engineer
has acquired enough understanding and knowledge of the whole beneficiation process.

• There are two possible methods of going about the design .

• The first option is to focus on coming up with an optimal size reduction unit, with the
hope that when these optimal units are connected in a circuit they will result in an
optimum overall process.

• However, this is an old school approach that is becoming less popular and being slowly
replaced by the second option.

• Historically engineers were limited by the available computing power and so could only
solve the optimisation for one unit at a time.
Design of Grinding Circuits
• The modern day engineering approach is driven more by principles
such as process intensification, process integration and systems
optimization.
• These techniques focus on the entire process as opposed to individual
units and do not abide by the belief that optimum units lead to an
optimum overall process.
• In this second option, downstream beneficiation units such as
flotation, leaching or smelters are all taken into account and an entire
mineral processing circuit is designed.
• Whichever approach a designer may opt for, individual mills will still
need to be sized and the next section looks at the different methods
used in sizing ball mills.
• Ball mills are the most commonly used size reduction units.
Rate of Production Method
• In the rate of production method of sizing an industrial scale mill, a laboratory
scale ball mill of known dimensions is used to perform experiments with the
objective of producing an optimum amount of the desired size class material.
• Mill conditions such as residence time, grinding media size, degree of loading,
slurry density, interstitial filling level, etc are specified and systematically
varied in order to maximise the desired product size class material.
• After optimal operating conditions have been identified, well known scale up
procedures are then applied in order to design an industrial scale mill based
on the rate of production of desired size class material from a laboratory scale
ball mill.
• This method is still being used today by some manufacturers of ball mills as
well as designers of milling circuits.
• However, its biggest shortfalls lie in the method’s inability to specify other
optimal operating parameters such as recycle ratio and by-pass as well as
inability to deal with changes in feed and product size specifications.
The specific energy method

•• Specific energy (equation 3.1) is defined as energy per unit mass and is sometimes referred to as
 energy density.
• It is measured in kWh per ton and incorporates the kinetic, potential and internal energy
components in its expression.
(3.1)
Where: Mp is the mill power and Q the mass output rate of desired product.
• The specific energy method is similar to the first method in that it uses a laboratory scale mill to
experimentally determine the optimal conditions which are then scaled up using well known scale
up procedures.
• The difference between the specific energy approach and the first method lies in that power is
measured that is required by a pilot mill to produce a specified product size from a given feed size.
• This power is converted to the specific energy using equation 3.1.
• An assumption is then made that the specific energy required to produce a required product size at
a desired output rate from a given feed size, is independent of the mill design.
• Using this technique, an industrial mill with a specified production capacity can then be sized.
• This approach still finds application in some modern day mill design factories and industries.
• However, it has serious limitations in terms of its failure to account for the expected variations in
residence time & material flow rates in the mill as well as its failure to specify the optimal recycle
ratio and other mill operating parameters or conditions.
The Kick, Rittinger or Bond methods

• 
• The third method uses a combination of the principles behind methods 1 & 2
and those from the old empirical laws of grinding.

• The laws of grinding were postulated in an attempt to relate the size reduction
process to the input energy.

• The general grinding law was proposed as:

(3.2)
Where: E is grinding energy per unit mass, is the mean particle size, C and n are constants for a
given material and mill.

• When n = 1, 2 or 1.5, integration of equation (3.2) gives rise to Kick’s law,

Rittinger’s Law, or Bond’s law respectively.
Kick’s Law
• 
• Kick’s law states that the specific energy necessary to go from size to
size is:

(3.3)

Where K has the physical meaning of the energy required to produce a

10 fold reduction in particle size, and are arbitrary single sizes
characterizing the feed and product distributions, e.g. 80% passing
sizes.
Rittinger’s law
•  Rittinger’s Law says that the specific energy (E) of grinding is directly
proportional to the new surface area produced.
• The energy surface area balance of Rittinger’s law in terms of particle
sizes is:
(3.4)
Where:

• is the fraction by weight less than size X of products of fracture

• is the fraction by weight less than size X of the feed material.
• is the time taken for a particle to reduce from its feed to product size.
Bond’s Law
•  Bond’s law of comminution can be empirically expressed as:
(3.5)
• Where: is the bond work index, whose physical meaning is 1.5 times
the specific grinding energy required to reduce feed particles () from
900µm to product particles () of 100µm.
• are the 80% by weight passing sizes in the product and feed
respectively.
• Method 3 also applies scale up models in order to size industrial scale
mills.
• The method still finds application in modern day mill circuit design.
• However, these three classical laws or empirical expressions are a
rough estimate of solution to the fourth method, the population
balance model.
The Population Balance Model Method

•• The
  fourth and most accurate method of sizing ball mills and also used in the design and
optimization of milling circuits is the population balance model also known as the size-
mass balance equation.
• An expression of the rate for a grinding system is given by a population balance model
(P.B.M) expression:
(3.6),
where:
i and j are size classes,
is the mass fraction of the particles in size class i, after a grind time t,
is the specific rate of breakage of size class i
is the mass fraction of broken products from size class j, which appear in size class i on
primary breakage, and
t is the grinding time.
The Population balance Model
• Equation
  3.6 makes it possible to predict the product PSD at various
grinding times if the parameters bij and Si are known for all size classes.
For breakage of the feed (size class 1) material, integration of Equation
3.6 yields:
(3.7)
or
(3.8).

• If the grinding process follows a first order model, then a plot of

versus t should give a straight line, the gradient of which is the
selection function or first order rate of breakage (S1)
• In many cases, breakage of material in a batch laboratory ball mill will
show a reasonable approximation to what Equation 3.7 leads one to
expect however breakage does not always follow a first order model
Size Reduction Equipment
• In mineral processing, all ores have to be reduced to a
desired/specified size range for efficient downstream processing. It is
the purpose of all size reduction equipment, to produce this size
range.
• The desirability of using a number of size reduction units when the
particle size is to be considerably reduced arises from the fact that it
is not generally economical to effect a large reduction ratio in a single
machine.
• Size reduction equipment is usually classified according to the size of
the feed and product, as shown in Table 3.1:
Equipment Feed size Product size

Coarse crushers -1500+40 mm -50+5 mm

Intermediate crushers -50+5 mm -5+0.1 mm

Fine crushers -5+0.1 mm -0.1 mm

Colloid mills -0.1 mm -0.01µm
 Types of Crushing Equipment
• The most important coarse, intermediate and fine crushers may be
classified as in Table 3.2:
Coarse crushers Intermediate crushers Fine crushers

Jaw crusher Crushing rolls Ball mill

Gyratory crusher Hammer mill Rod mill

  Single roll crusher Tube mill

    Babcock mill
Sample Preparation Equipment
• After the run-of-material is processed by way of size reduction in a
comminution circuit, samples of the product material are obtained
from the circuit and prepared for analysis using any of the methods or
techniques below:

Figure 3.7: Cone and quartering

Figure 3.6: Jones Riffle Splitter

Size Analysis Equipment
• After sample preparation, a homogenous sample is sent to the
laboratory for size analysis using any of the methods described below:

Figure 3.9: The Malvern particle size analyzer (2000MU

model)

Figure 3.8: Stacked sieves (with a diameter of 30cm) used

for a size test
Class Example
A material is crushed in a jaw crusher such that the average size of
particle is reduced from 50 mm to 10 mm with the consumption of
energy of 13.0 kW/(kg/s). what would be the consumption of energy
needed to crush the same material of average size 75 mm to an average
size of 25 mm:

• Assuming Rittinger’s law applies?

• Assuming Kick’s law applies?

Which of these results would be regarded as being more reliable and

why?