RE-GRINDING AS A QUALITY IMPROVEMENT TOOL

The high quality of products is the key to successful competition in the market. Therefore, each manufacturer pursues two goals: cost reduction and improvement of quality indicators of products. Today we will talk about mining and processing plants.

We have already noted that most of the mining and processing plants, according to the recommendations of our specialists, have conducted a number of tests over the past 2-3 years to reduce the diameter of the grinding balls used. The result of such changes was a finer grinding (disclosure of the “grain”), which in turn increased the content of the useful element in the industrial product.

This method is very effective in the conditions of the mining and processing plants, which are designed using a three-stage scheme of crushing rock. This scheme is in most cases common in the post-Soviet space. A two-stage scheme with a small (up to 4-5) number of sections is mainly used abroad. Changing the diameter of grinding balls in this case does not always bring the desired result.

In this case, the installation and introduction of an additional ball mill into the enrichment scheme has the maximum expediency. In other words, an additional grinding unit is introduced into the general grinding scheme.

As a rule, this is a pipe mill, the working volume of which is larger than the internal volume of ball mills, which are used in the last stage of grinding. To achieve greater disclosure of the “grains”, the entire concentrate after passing through all stages is reduced to powering the grinding mill. The improvement of grinding is achieved through the use of smaller grinding media. So, one of our clients uses steel grinding balls with a diameter of 100mm and 60mm (1st and 2nd stages of grinding, respectively) during the grinding process. In the grinding mill, according to the calculations of our specialists, steel grinding balls with a diameter of 30 mm should be used. The initial loading of the mill was carried out by grinding balls of 30-40mm produced by OOO “Plant “Energosteel”.

This method of improving the quality of manufactured products over the past year has been implemented at several mining and processing plants located in the near abroad (Georgia, Azerbaijan, etc.). In Ukraine, this technology is also used, which has been successfully implemented at the Poltava GOK. The only difference that takes into account the scale of the grinding process at this enterprise is that Vertimills were installed instead of tube ball mills.

The specialists of the Energosteel company constantly monitor the trends in the development of technologies in the field of grinding. We constantly conduct tests and recommend to our customers the most effective solutions to improve the grinding process.