Prediction of energy effective grinding conditions

Abstract

Grinding processes in general are extremely energy intensive. In order to optimize the energy consumption the choice of the process parameters is important. The decision on the process parameters often depends on experiences or a certain number of experiments before starting a process.Here a model will be shown which enables the prediction of optimum process parameters for ceramic materials in wet stirred media milling. The model was built on the basis of the model of stress energy. The optimum stress intensity (optimum stress energy related to particle volume) is correlated with the compression strength, due to the assumption that pressure is dominant type of stress in stirred media mills. The term describing the strength of the particles is correlated with the material property parameters taking the grinding limit into account. The enhanced model enables the prediction of grinding media size and stirrer tip speed for certain desired particle finesses, if material parameters like Young’s moduli and density of product and grinding media as well as the compression strength are known. This model can be used for different mill types if different the stress energy distributions are taken into account.