Monitoring and analysis of the multi-disc comminution characteristics

Abstract

Comminution processes are one of the most commonly used in food, chemical, cosmetics, pharmaceutical industry as well as the part of the recycling activities. Disc or multi-disc mills play and important role in the comminution of biomaterials cause of their high effectiveness and throughput. One of the challenges, which the comminution technology has been facing for the long time, is decreasing the energy consumption and increasing throughput. To achieve this, the complex knowledge about the comminution process inside the mill should be available. For this reason, the in-time monitoring systems of comminution characteristics, which ensures identification of the relations between changes of process parameters and comminution characteristics, for example power consumption, size reduction ratio, throughput, and specific energy consumption were applicated to the mills. This study was aimed to analyze and identify certain relationships between comminution process control parameters (eg. speed of dosing the batch, velocity of comminution elements) and comminution characteristics. The experiment on five-disc mill was carried out to achieve the goals. The different disc velocities and batch dosing speeds were tested during rice and corn comminution. The results show that the power consumption during the process is correlated with disc velocities cumulative gradient and the throughput correlated with batch dosing speed.