Disintegration of geomaterials in ore pretreatment–The role and significance

Abstract

It is shown that all ore pretreatment processes including the stages of crushing and grinding, depending on the structural and texture features of geomaterials, have two interconnected sides: destruction and disintegration. Disintegration is considered as a process of selective separation of geomaterials by their weakest bonds and as a process concomitant with mechanical destruction. The paper justifies the methodology for determining the degree of geomaterial disintegration by the example of impact crushing using grain size composition of crushed products. The proposed procedure is based on isolating the fraction of material that is predominantly accumulated in the form of a mode, which depends on the energy of mechanical effect that is responsible for the process of actual geomaterial destruction and is determined as a lognormal distribution. In this case, the degree of disintegration is determined by subtracting the fraction of geomaterial formed directly by mechanical destruction (in percent or unit fractions) from total distribution sum of grain size composition. Examples of calculating the degree of disintegration for some ore geomaterials are given. Assessing the degree of disintegration according to the developed procedure can become an important characteristic of ore pretreatment and operating performance factor of crushing and grinding devices.