HOME

A MECHANISTIC MODEL OF BATCH GRINDING IN BALL MILLS

L Tavares1 and R Carvalho2
ABSTRACT
The linear population balance model has been widely and successfully used in the last several decades to describe batch grinding in ball mills. This model has also been the basis of some approaches which have been used in the scale-up of ball mills from data gathered in the laboratory and/or pilot plant. In spite of its relative success, the model has some limitations in mill scale-up in regard to the great amount of empiricism and the questionability of some model suppositions. In addition, the scaleup approaches are not capable of describing the inuence on mill performance of ner details of the mill, such as material and conguration used in the liners. The paper describes a mechanistic model of grinding in a batch mill that combines data from single-particle breakage tests and media motion simulations using the discrete element method. While also based on the population balance model, the model allows describing explicitly a number of variables, such as ball size, mill hold-up, diameter and liner conguration, with no tting to batch grinding data required. The model takes into account the distribution of stressing energies in the mill, the distribution of fracture energies of particles contained in the charge, describing energy-dependent catastrophic breakage by impacts from media elements, breakage by abrasion (surface breakage) and weakening that particles undergo due to repeated impacts. This fully-predictive model is applied to describe batch grinding of selected materials with reasonable agreement to experimental data. The potential of the model to become the basis of a robust ball mill scale-up approach in the future is discussed. Keywords: ball mill, modelling, particle breakage, mechanistic modelling

INTRODUCTION
The linear population balance model has been widely and successfully used in the last several decades to describe batch grinding in ball mills. This model has also been the basis of some approaches that have been used in the scale-up of ball mills from data gathered in the laboratory and/or pilot plant. In spite of its relative success in mill scale-up, the model has some limitations in regard to the great amount of empiricism and limitations in the validity of model suppositions. In addition, the scale-up approaches are not capable of describing the inuence of ner constructive details in the performance of the mill, such as liner conguration and liner material. In an attempt to overcome these limitations of the traditional population balance model, King and Bourgeois (1993) have proposed, in the XVIII IMPC held in Sydney, a conceptual model for ball milling. This model was based on the combination of information on the collision energy spectrum in the mill and data from breakage of single particles. Although very promising, given that it provided a framework for establishing a connection between the response of a single particle to an impact from grinding media inside the charge and the product size distribution from the mill, the approach suffered from a number of limitations. First, it assumed that comminution is solely due to body breakage, with no attention given to surface breakage, which certainly plays an important, although secondary role, in the ball mill. Second, it assumed that the fracture strengths of particles remain unchanged throughout the process, whereas it is now recognised (Tavares and King, 2002; Tavares and Carvalho, 2009), that the strength of particles contained in the charge vary both due to the highest breakage probability of weaker particles and to the weakening of tougher particles due to accrual of damage. Finally, this model also suffered from limitations associated to
1. Associate Professor, Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, COPPE-UFRJ, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Centro de Tecnologia, Bloco F, Sala 210, Cidade

Universitria, Rio de Janeiro RJ 21949-900, Brazil. Email: tavares@ufrj.br

2. Research Associate, Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, COPPE-UFRJ, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Centro de Tecnologia, Bloco F, Sala 210, Cidade

Universitria, Rio de Janeiro RJ 21949-900, Brazil. Email: rodrigo@metalmat.ufrj.br

XXV INTERNATIONAL MINERAL PROCESSING CONGRESS (IMPC) 2010 PROCEEDINGS / BRISBANE, QLD, AUSTRALIA / 6 - 10 SEPTEMBER 2010

1287

L TAVARES AND R CARVALHO

the relatively crude models, available at the time, that were used to describe single particle and particle bed breakage. Nevertheless, this important work set the background for the development of a mechanistic description of ball mills, which is believed will be the basis of a robust mill scale-up approach in the future. The paper describes a model of grinding in a batch mill that combines data from single-particle breakage tests to results from simulations of media motion using the discrete element method. While also based on the population balance model, the model allows describing explicitly a number of variables such as ball size, mill hold-up and diameter, as well as liner conguration with no tting to batch grinding data required. The model attempts to overcome the limitations of the conceptual model proposed by King and Bourgeois (1993) by taking into account the distribution of stressing energies in the mill, the distribution of fracture energies of particles in the charge, describing breakage by impacts from media elements producing catastrophic (body) breakage, surface breakage and weakening that particles undergo due to repeated impacts.

A MICROSCALE LOOK AT BALL MILLING

Although the traditional population balance model describes what happens in a mill as a continuum, with the breakage processes taking place continuously, breakage of particles is essentially discrete (King and Bourgeois, 1993). In a ball mill, these breakage events occur when particles are stressed between media elements which are in relative motion to each other. Several particles may be involved in a single stressing event, and a particle may break or not, depending on the amount of energy that it absorbs during this event. If the amount of energy available for the particle in a stressing event is insufcient to cause fracture (body breakage), it may only suffer surface breakage (abrasion) and become damaged, requiring a smaller amount of energy to break in a future stressing event. If the amount of energy available is sufcient to cause fracture, a distribution of progeny fragments will be produced, which may or may not be further broken, depending on the stressing energy. From this brief description it is evident that a quantitative description of ball milling at a microscale level requires detailed knowledge of the mechanical environment in the mill, as well as the response of the particulate material contained in assemblies to the applied stresses. The mechanical environment is characterised by the magnitude and frequency of the collision events between grinding media and also by the geometry of the contacts, which determines the volume of material captured in each stressing event. Relevant material properties that determine the outcome of breakage events include the minimum amount of energy required to produce primary body fracture (also called particle fracture energy), the material response to stresses that have insufcient magnitude to produce body breakage, the degree of multiple breakage when parent particles and their progeny are stressed as a result of a collision event of a given magnitude, and surface breakage. In order to predict grinding results using this microscale approach it is necessary to combine the quantitative description of the mechanical environment in the mill to models that describe the material response to the stresses. In the case of continuous mills, an additional description of the solids or slurry transport through the vessel also becomes necessary. These different components must be appropriately combined in the form of a process model, which will allow establishing a link between the microscale phenomena that occur in the ball mill to measurable outcomes of the comminution process, such as product size distribution, product specic surface area and specic energy consumption.

MECHANICAL ENVIRONMENT
Breakage events occur as the results of the linear and angular motion of balls in relation to each other, resulting in contacts that vary from head-on collisions to the shearing action of balls rolling over each other inside the charge. In this context, information of the mechanical environment that is relevant to describing ball milling at a microscale level include the type, frequency and magnitude of collision events involving grinding media. In the past, insights into these could only be gained through extremely careful and tedious experiments (Yashima et al, 1988; Powell and Nurick, 1996), through which the history of collisions of individual balls was followed over a period of time. Fortunately, since the 1990s it has been possible to simulate the motion of media in ball mills through the application of the discrete element method DEM (Mishra and Rajamani, 1992). DEM is a simulation tool which uses Newtonian physics with appropriate contact models coupled to powerful computational tools
XXV INTERNATIONAL MINERAL PROCESSING CONGRESS (IMPC) 2010 PROCEEDINGS / BRISBANE, QLD, AUSTRALIA / 6 - 10 SEPTEMBER 2010

1288

A MECHANISTIC MODEL OF BATCH GRINDING IN BALL MILLS

Cumulative number of collisions per second (x10) f

500 Normal component Shear component r

400

300

200

100

0 10-5

10-4

10-3

10-2

10-1

100

101

102

Collision energy (mJ)

FIG 1 - DEM simulations of a batch mill (0.3 m diameter, 0.3 m length, operating at 67 per cent of critical speed with 25 mm alloy steel balls at 30 per cent mill filling).

that allows predicting the magnitude and frequency of collisions that occur in the mill of a given geometry that is operating under certain conditions. In spite of its wide recognition as a tool for describing media motion in mills, with applications such as the analysis of charge motion for improved plant operation, power draw prediction (Mishra, 2003) and estimating liner wear (Cleary, 1998), controversy still exists on how DEM can be more appropriately used to predict breakage in mills (Powell and McBride, 2006). In one extreme, some researchers have suggested that, when coupled to tools such as the discrete grain breakage model (DGB), DEM could be used in the complete description of comminution in media mills, with both particles and grinding media described in the discrete simulations (Herbst, 2004; Herbst and Potapov, 2004). Although promising, this approach is not yet realistic, given the enormous computing power required to keep track of the large population of particles generated in each breakage event, and also due to the uncertainties associated to the delity of the DGB model in describing quantitatively particle breakage. An alternative and more realistic approach is to use DEM just to estimate the distribution of collision energies in the mill, leaving the simulation of breakage to be conducted using an appropriate model that integrates both particle breakage models and the collision energy distribution. Although it requires considerably less computing power, this approach has challenges of its own. For instance, in this approach DEM considers the particulate phase as a continuum in the mill and their presence is only account for indirectly, through the use of appropriate contact parameter values, which are certainly different from those used to describe steel-on-steel contacts. Further, since particles do not appear explicitly in the DEM simulations, it becomes necessary to estimate the amount of material that is captured in each stressing event and also how the collision energy is shared among particles involved in each impact. This later approach is the one chosen in the present work to simulate the ball mill. Typical results from DEM media motion simulations of a batch laboratory ball mill conducted using the software EDEM (DEM Solutions, Edinburgh, UK) are presented in Figure 1. The no slip HertzMindlin contact law (DEM Solutions, 2009) has been used to describe the contacts among grinding media and between them and the mill shell. A summary of the constants used to describe ball-ball and ball-wall contacts in DEM is presented in Table 1. The gure shows that, for the conditions studied, the shear component has a lower magnitude than the normal component. It also shows that the proportion of collision events of magnitude above a few millijoules is comparatively small. Figure 1 also shows that the frequency of collision events of negligible magnitude (below about 0.01 mJ) is signicant, in particular when considering the shear component. In the present work it is considered that the shear component has a negligible contribution to grinding in a ball mill and also that normal collisions with magnitude below 0.1 mJ can be neglected, since they may be considered an artefact of the DEM simulations. With these assumptions, the average number of collisions () in the test mill
XXV INTERNATIONAL MINERAL PROCESSING CONGRESS (IMPC) 2010 PROCEEDINGS / BRISBANE, QLD, AUSTRALIA / 6 - 10 SEPTEMBER 2010

1289

L TAVARES AND R CARVALHO

TABLE 1 Parameters used in the 3D-DEM simulations. Poissons ratio Shear modulus Density Coefficient of restitution Coefficient of static friction Coefficient of rolling friction 0.3 7 x 1010 Pa 7800 kg/m3 0.5 0.5 0.01

simulated in Figure 1 becomes about 230 000 and the cumulative distribution of collision energies may be described by a lower-truncated Rosin-Rammler distribution, given by:
E 0.0001 0.77 P ( E ) = 1 exp 0.004 (1)

where E is the collision energy, given in Joules.

PARTICLE BREAKAGE CHARACTERISTICS

Once the mechanical environment has been appropriately described, in order to model the ball mill it then becomes necessary to understand how the energy available from the collisions between media elements and between them and the mill liners produce breakage. Recognising that particles are not stressed individually, but nearly always in assemblies inside the mill, it is evident that a microscale model of the ball mill will require some description of the response of particles to stresses when they are in a bed. The response of material to stressing in a bed will be co-determined by the material characteristics and by the nature of the contact. For instance, the shape and size of the grinding media and the slurry viscosity will directly inuence the amount of material caught in each stressing event and also how the available kinetic energy from each collision will be shared among particles contained in the bed. Probably overwhelmed by the complexity in describing the details of modelling breakage of particle beds, some researchers (Datta and Rajamani, 2002) tackled the problem by considering that the amount of material broken and the energy-specic size distribution are material properties and should be characterised experimentally. Recognising that it would not be feasible to cover with experiments all possible combinations encountered when particles are stressed in a bed, the present work proposes to describe the material response in a particle bed as a function of more fundamental single-particle breakage characteristics. This approach inevitably requires that descriptions of the interaction of particles in assemblies and grinding media, and that detailed descriptions of the response of individual particles to stressing, are also available. Quantitative descriptions of the response of individual particles to different modes of application of stresses are described as follows. It has been widely demonstrated (Tavares and King, 1998) that particles require a minimum amount of energy in order to break catastrophically. This mode of breakage, more appropriately called body breakage, is characterised by this energy, called particle fracture energy, which varies from particle to particle, depending on their individual size, shape, aw structure and composition. A great deal of data exists that demonstrates that the distribution of fracture energies of particles of a given material contained in a narrow size fraction can be well described using the upper-truncated lognormal distribution, given by (Tavares and King, 2002):
Fi ( E , 0) = lnE * l E E 1 50 ,i 1 + erf 2 2 2 i
(2)

where:
E* = Emax,i E Emax,i E (3)

where E50,i is the median particle fracture energy, i2 is the variance and Emax,i is the upper truncation value of the distribution. A comparison between data from single-particle impact-breakage tests
XXV INTERNATIONAL MINERAL PROCESSING CONGRESS (IMPC) 2010 PROCEEDINGS / BRISBANE, QLD, AUSTRALIA / 6 - 10 SEPTEMBER 2010

1290

A MECHANISTIC MODEL OF BATCH GRINDING IN BALL MILLS

0.8
Fracture probability

Gran ulite

0.4

0.2

10 100 1000 Specific fracture energies (J/kg)

Cop per o r

0.6

Lime ston e

10000

FIG 2 - Distribution of particle fracture energies of selected materials contained in the size range 11.2 9.5 mm.

in the impact load cell (Tavares and King, 1998) for selected materials and Equations 2 and 3 is presented in Figure 2, which shows good agreement. Typically, as particles become ner, they become tougher and their specic fracture energy increases. An expression that can be used to describe that variation is given by:
d E50,i = E 1 + o di

m pi

(4)

where di is the representative size of particles contained in the ith class, E, do and are model parameters that should be tted to experimental data. Figure 3 shows a comparison between the measured and the tted values calculated using Equation 4, which demonstrates good agreement. The mean weight of particles contained in size class i may be estimated by:
m pi

di3

(5)

where is the material specic gravity and the volume shape factor.
Mass specific median fracture energy - E50 (J/kg)
10000

1000

Copper ore

100

Granulite Limestone

10 0.1

10

Particle size (mm)

FIG 3 - Variation of median mass-specific fracture energy with particle size for selected materials.

XXV INTERNATIONAL MINERAL PROCESSING CONGRESS (IMPC) 2010 PROCEEDINGS / BRISBANE, QLD, AUSTRALIA / 6 - 10 SEPTEMBER 2010

1291

L TAVARES AND R CARVALHO

The upper truncation parameter Emax,i of the distribution of particle fracture energies (Equation 2) also varies with size and may also be tted to an expression analogous to Equation 4. For simplicity, in the present work it has been calculated by Emax,i = E50,i, where is a constant that should be determined using impact-fracture data. In addition, i2 is often relatively constant with particle size, so that it is here considered equal to 2. The importance of Equations 2 and 3 lie in the fact that an equivalence exists between the distribution of particle fracture energies and the fracture probability. As a result, they allow to determine the proportion of particles that will break when all particles in the population are stressed with an energy E. Whenever particles are stressed with an insufcient amount of energy to cause body breakage, they will remain unbroken, but their fracture energies will be reduced, due to accrued damage. A model that describes this phenomenon has been proposed by Tavares and King (2002) and is given by:
F [ E / (1 D )] Fn ( Ek ) Fn+1 ( E ) = n 1 Fn ( Ek ) (6)

and:
2 (1 D ) Ek 5 D= (2 5 D + 5) E
2

(7)

where Fn(Ek) is the proportion of particles broken in the nth impact from the application of an impact energy Ek and E is the fracture energy of the particle that remained unbroken after the nth impact. D is the amount of damage sustained by that particle and is the damage accumulation coefcient, which characterises the amenability of the material to damage by repeated impacts. When the collision energy is higher than the fracture energy of the particle, then the particle will break, generating progeny fragments. This distribution of fragments is described using the singleparticle cumulative breakage (appearance) function, which is well characterised using the incomplete beta function, given by:
tn (t10 , , ) = 100
t10 /100

x
0

an 1 1

x)

n 1

dx

an 1 1

x)

n 1

dx

(8)

where each tn is the percentage passing in a d0/n size, in which d0 is particle original size. n, e and n are parameters that must be t to experimental data. The agreement between Equation 8 and singleparticle breakage data is demonstrated in Figure 4.
100

80
t1.2 t1.5 t2 t4 t25 t50 t75

60
tn (%)

40

20 t10 (%)

40

60

FIG 4 - Comparison of appearance function values to the fit to the incomplete beta function for copper ore (Equation 8).
XXV INTERNATIONAL MINERAL PROCESSING CONGRESS (IMPC) 2010 PROCEEDINGS / BRISBANE, QLD, AUSTRALIA / 6 - 10 SEPTEMBER 2010

1292

A MECHANISTIC MODEL OF BATCH GRINDING IN BALL MILLS

TABLE 2 Summary of parameters determined experimentally and used in the simulations. (g/cm3) 2.73 2.80 2.93 Impact breakage E (J/kg) 13.4 123.0 12.38 do (mm) 10.0 0.91 26 730 (-) 1.50 1.68 0.44 (-) 0.80 0.89 0.80 (-) 4.0 4.0 4.0 A (%) 56.0 47.5 51.5 b (-) 0.023 0.027 0.028 (-) 5.4 5.0 4.5 Abrasion (%/s) 0.037 0.004 0.011

Material Limestone Granulite Copper ore

The single-particle breakage function is then calculated in its cumulative form (Bij) by interpolating the t10 versus tn data. The relationship of the parameter t10 for particles contained in size class j with impact and fracture energy is calculated by:
t10 E A 1 + exp b E50b j
(9)

where A and b are model parameters and E50b,j is the median particle fracture energy of the particles that are broken as a result of the impact of magnitude E. When the magnitude of the impacts is higher than the strength of the toughest particle, then E50b,j = E50,j, otherwise it should be calculated numerically (Tavares and Carvalho, 2009). Finally, surface breakage is modelled using data from the JKMRC tumbling test (Napier-Munn et al, 1996) considering a simple approach, by assuming that it follows rst-order kinetics. Its breakage function in the cumulative form is given by Aij = (di/dA).The set of parameters that characterise the breakage behaviour of the materials studied is presented in Table 2. For the materials studied the surface breakage distribution function parameters values were set to dA = 0.25 mm and = 0.31.

BATCH GRINDING MODEL

The batch grinding process equation can be derived from a more general formulation of the traditional population balance model applied to the microscale description of size reduction processes (Carvalho and Tavares, 2009). The equation that describes the rates of changes in mass of particles contained in size class i is:
dwi (t ) dt =

D (t ) Di ,s (t ) + Ai ,b (t ) + Ai ,s (t ) M i ,b

(10)

where M is the mill hold-up. wi(t) is the mass fraction of particles contained in class i in the mill and is the frequency of stressing events in the comminution machine. Functions A and D represent the rate of appearance and disappearance of material in class i due to fracture, being dened in Table 3, whereas subscripts b and s stand for body and surface breakage mechanisms, respectively. In the equations listed in Table 3, p(E) is the distribution of stressing energies E in the mill, mj is the mass of particles contained in size class j captured in each stressing event and p(e) is the function that represents the energy split among these particles. aij and bij are the breakage functions in density form, corresponding to the mechanisms of surface and body breakage, respectively, the later dependent on stressing energy (Tavares and Carvalho, 2009). is the rst order surface breakage rate. The density distribution of stressing energies in the p(E) is calculated from the cumulative distribution, from p(E) = dP(E)/dE. The product eE is the fraction of the impact energy that is absorbed by each particle captured in an impact event. Equation 10 should be solved simultaneously with the equation that describes how the fracture probability distribution of particles contained in each size class varies with time, which may be calculated by:
Fi ( E , t t ) = Gi F *i ( E , t t ) Hi Fi ( E , 0) I i Fi ( E , t ) Gi + Hi Ii (11)

where the fracture probability distribution of the original material Fi(E, 0) is well described using the upper-truncated lognormal distribution, given in Equations 2 and 3.
XXV INTERNATIONAL MINERAL PROCESSING CONGRESS (IMPC) 2010 PROCEEDINGS / BRISBANE, QLD, AUSTRALIA / 6 - 10 SEPTEMBER 2010

1293

L TAVARES AND R CARVALHO

TABLE 3 Definition of terms in Equation 10. Breakage mode Body (b) Ai ,b ( t ) =

i 1

Rate of appearance (A)

j =1 j

i 1

w j ( t ) m j ( E ) p( E ) bij eE t ) Fj ( eE , t ) p( e ) dedE e
0 0 1

Surface (s)

Ai , s ( t ) =

eE d d w (t ) m (E ) p(E ) a ((eE ,t )[1 F (eE ,t )]p(e)dedE

j j ij j j =1 0 0

Rate of disappearance (D) Body (b) Di , b ( t ) =

j =1

i 1

w j (t ) m j ( E ) p( E ) [
0 0

bij eE t )]Fj ( , t ) p( e ) dedE d

Surface (s)

Di , s ( t ) = w j ( t ) j m j ( E ) p( E ) [
0 0

Fj ( eE , t )] p( e ) dedE

Fi(E, t) is the distribution of fracture energies of the material that did not suffer any impact event during the time interval, whereas Fi*(E,t + t) is the distribution of fracture energies of the particles that were captured in an impact event, but which did not fracture, being given by:
Ei*

F * ( E , t t ) =
i

p( E )
k 0 0

Fi [ E / (
Ei*

1 Fi (eEk , t ) eE

D ) t ] Fi (eEk , t ) eE p(e)dedEk
k k

(12)

p( E ) dE
0

and:
2 (1 D ) eEk 5 E D= (2 5 D + 5) E
2

(13)

where Ei* is the maximum fracture energy of particles contained in class i, which is equal to Emax,i in the rst time interval and Fi(Ei*) = 1 as comminution progresses (Tavares and Carvalho, 2009). The model is able to account for the fact that particles that are stressed but that do not fracture in a stressing event, may become progressively weaker. The various terms in Equation 11 are given by:
t Gi (t ) = w (t )( M (t ) i
) mi ( E ) p( E ) [ E) E)
0 0

Fi (eE , t )] p(e) de dE e

(14)

which is the fraction of material in the class that has been damaged but remained in the original size range, and:
t Hi = M (t )

w (t ) m ( E) p( E) b
j j j =1 0 0

ij

eE eE t ) F j (eE , t ) p(e) de dE + Ai ,s e

(15)

which is the fraction of material that appeared due to body and surface breakage, and:
I i (t ) =
wi (t ) M (t ) t mi ( E ) p( E ) de M (t ) 0

(16)

which is the fraction of material that was not captured in the time interval. Unfortunately, no generally well-accepted functions are available to calculate mi(E) and p(e). The mass of material captured mi(E) in the active breakage zone in each collision event is probably
XXV INTERNATIONAL MINERAL PROCESSING CONGRESS (IMPC) 2010 PROCEEDINGS / BRISBANE, QLD, AUSTRALIA / 6 - 10 SEPTEMBER 2010

1294

A MECHANISTIC MODEL OF BATCH GRINDING IN BALL MILLS

inuenced by contact geometry, size distribution of particles inside the mill and the friction coefcient between balls and particles (Schnert, 1979). This mass may be calculated by mi = Ncap,i mp,i. The number of particles captured in a stressing event, Ncap,i, may be estimated by considering that the ner the size of particles in comparison to balls, the larger their number. A relationship of this type is:
Ncap,i = 1 + a(db/dp)b (17)

where parameters a and b have been tted to experimental data as 0.0021 and 1.7, respectively (Tavares and Carvalho, 2009). p(e) allows to consider that particles involved in each collision inside a mill absorb different proportions of the stressing energy, depending on their radial position within the bed. A simplifying assumption found to be reasonably valid (Tavares and Carvalho, 2009) is that the stressing energy is split equally among particles positioned within the active breakage zone in the mill. In this case the energy distribution function may be given by:
p(e) = (e1/Ncap,i) (18)

where is the Dirac delta function.

RESULTS
Batch grinding experiments have been conducted in a 0.3 by 0.3 m ball mill, operating dry at 67 per cent of critical speed with 30 per cent lling of 25 mm steel balls and at 100 per cent of interstitial powder lling. Samples ground in the tests were contained in narrow size ranges and the products at different grinding times were collected and analysed by wet sieving. Figure 5 compares the measured fraction remaining in the size range 9.5 6.3 mm of selected materials to simulations. It shows that the proposed model can describe the data with reasonable accuracy in this size range, appropriately describing the non-rst order breakage rates observed, which are typical of the signicant role of surface breakage of such coarse particles. A generally good agreement has also been observed for ner size ranges (Tavares and Carvalho, 2009), which demonstrates the validity of the model, as well as of the assumptions considered in the model development. In some cases, however, it has been shown that simulations predicted a greater departure from rst-order breakage rates for ner particles than is usually observed experimentally. This is probably associated to the relatively crude models (Equations 17 and 18) used to describe the mass of material captured in each stressing event as well as the energy split among particles in the bed. This is the subject of ongoing research in the authors laboratory. Figure 6 compares the measured to the predicted size distributions of the product from batch grinding tests with granulite and copper ore samples. It shows that the model predicted reasonably well the variation of the size distributions with time for grinding of the two materials. Indeed, in
1
Copper ore

w1(t)/w1(0)

Granulite

0.1

Limestone

0.01

10

20 30 Grinding time (min)

40

50

FIG 5 - Comparison between experimental disappearance plots and simulations using the microscale model for selected materials contained in size range 9.5 6.3 mm.

XXV INTERNATIONAL MINERAL PROCESSING CONGRESS (IMPC) 2010 PROCEEDINGS / BRISBANE, QLD, AUSTRALIA / 6 - 10 SEPTEMBER 2010

1295

L TAVARES AND R CARVALHO

100

Copper Ore -1.68 mm r

100

Granulite -4.75 mm

Cumulative passing (%)

10

Cumulative passing (%)

10

Initial 1 min. 4 min. 8 min. 15 min. 0.1 1 10

Initial 1 min. 5 min. 10 min. 12 min.

1 0.01 0.1 1 10

0.1 0.01

(a)

Particle size (mm)

(b)

Particle size (mm)

FIG 6 - Comparison of measured and simulated results of batch grinding of a) -1.68 mm copper ore and b) -4.75 mm granulite.

the case of predictions of grinding the minus 4.75 mm granulite sample, the model even described the abnormal size distributions of the product, that resemble predominance of surface breakage (abrasion), which is expected from grinding such coarse-sized material in such mild grinding conditions in the batch mill.

DISCUSSION
The great potential of the mechanistic approach to ball milling lies in the fact that the inuence of a number of variables can be described explicitly, with no empiricism. For instance, the inuence of mill diameter, liner material and prole and mill speed can be accounted for directly in the DEM simulations of media motion giving the impact energy spectrum as output. In the presently proposed approach to simulate the ball mill, the effect of mill hold-up (M) and powder interstitial lling is accounted for in different parts of the model. While it appears explicitly in Equation 10 of the materials balance, it will also inuence the time step used in the numerical integration of the same equation. Further, it will also appear indirectly in the form of the contact parameters used in the DEM simulations (Table 1), given the greater cushioning effect produced by a larger proportion of particles in relation to media. However, the nature of these relationships is not yet clear. The effect of ball diameter and ball size distribution can also be taken into account by DEM, but its effect in grinding will also depend on the delity of the description of the functions that account for the interaction between grinding media and particles assembled in beds. The solids concentration in the feed and its impact on slurry rheology in the mill will also inuence both the contact parameters used in the DEM simulations and the functions describing the interaction of particles and grinding media, with a secondary effect on single-particle breakage properties. When all relationships are well-known and established and when appropriate descriptions of mill transport are available, then it would have been reached a fully predictive ball mill scale-up approach, through which industrial mills will be designed using solely data from single-particle breakage tests and a few particle bed breakage tests conducted under controlled laboratory conditions. However, there is still a long path of model development and validation to be followed until this goal is achieved.

CONCLUSIONS
A model has been proposed that separates entirely the contributions of material and process, which allows predicting grinding rates and product size distributions in a ball mill with no tting to batch grinding data. The model has demonstrated to be able to predict non-rst order rates in breakage of coarse particles in a batch mill with good agreement to experimental data. The validity of the model has also been demonstrated by the good correspondence between measured and simulated size distributions from grinding samples of a copper ore and a granulite in the batch laboratory ball mill. The model proposed will allow, in combination with DEM simulations of media motion, to predict the inuence of mill lling, length and diameter, powder lling, liner design and ball size distribution

XXV INTERNATIONAL MINERAL PROCESSING CONGRESS (IMPC) 2010 PROCEEDINGS / BRISBANE, QLD, AUSTRALIA / 6 - 10 SEPTEMBER 2010

1296

A MECHANISTIC MODEL OF BATCH GRINDING IN BALL MILLS

on the breakage of particles in mills. This model will serve as the basis of a fully predicting model of the mill, which hopefully will represent a breakthrough in ball mill scale-up in the future.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank the nancial support from the Brazilian research agencies CNPq and CAPES, as well as from VALE and AMIRA, through the P9O project. The authors are also indebted to Prof Malcolm Powell and Dr Nirmal Weerasekara from the JKMRC for conducting the DEM simulations.

REFERENCES
Carvalho, R M and Tavares, L M, 2009. Dynamic modeling of comminution using a general microscale breakage model, Computer-Aided Chem Eng, 27:519 - 524. Cleary, P W, 1998. Predicting charge motion, power draw, segregation and wear in ball mills using discrete element methods, Miner Eng, 11:1061 - 1080. Datta, A and Rajamani, R K, 2002. A direct approach of modeling batch grinding in ball mills using population balance principles and impact energy distribution, Int J Min Process, 64:181 - 200. DEM Solutions, 2009, EDEM User Guide, DEM Solutions, Edinburgh, UK. Herbst, J A, 2004. A microscale look at tumbling mill scale-up using high delity simulation, Int J Min Process, 74:s299 - s306. Herbst, J A and Potapov, A V, 2004. Making a Discrete Grain Breakage model practical for comminution equipment performance simulation, Powder Technol, 143 - 144:144 - 150. King, R P and Bourgeois, F, 1993. A new conceptual model for ball milling, in Proceedings XVIII International Mineral Processing Congress, vol 1, pp 81 - 86 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, Sydney). Mishra B K, 2003. A review of computer simulation of tumbling mills by the discrete element method: Part II - Practical applications, Int J Miner Process, 71:95 - 112. Mishra, B K and Rajamani, R K, 1992. The discrete element method for the simulation of ball mills, Appl Math Model, 12:598 - 604. Napier-Munn, T J, Morrell, S, Morrison, R D, Kojovic, T, 1996. Mineral comminution circuits: their operation and optimization, in JKMRC Monograph Series in Mining and Mineral Processing, vol. 2, University of Queensland, Brisbane, 413 p. Powell, M S, McBride, A T, 2006. What is required from DEM simulation to model breakage in mills? Miner Eng, 19(10):1013 - 1021. Powell, M S and Nurick, G N, 1996. A study of charge motion in rotary mills part 2 experimental work, Miner Eng, 9(3):343 - 350. Schnert, K, 1979. Aspects of physics of breakage relevant to comminution, in Proceedings 4th Tewksbury Symposium, Melbourne, pp 3.1 - 3.9. Tavares, L M and Carvalho, R M, 2009. Modeling breakage rates of coarse particles in ball mills, Miner Eng, 22:650 - 659. Tavares, L M and King, R P, 1998. Single particle fracture under impact loading, Int J Miner Process, 54:1 - 28. Tavares, L M and King, R P, 2002. Modeling particle breakage by repeated impacts using continuum damage mechanics, Powder Tecnol, 123:138 - 146. Yashima, S, Hashimoto H, Kanda, Y and Sano, S, 1988. Measurement of kinetic energy of grinding in a tumbling ball mill, in Proceedings XVI International Mineral Processing Congress, pp 299 - 309 (Elsevier Science).

XXV INTERNATIONAL MINERAL PROCESSING CONGRESS (IMPC) 2010 PROCEEDINGS / BRISBANE, QLD, AUSTRALIA / 6 - 10 SEPTEMBER 2010

1297