Minerals Engineering 19 (2006) 1377–1379

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Technical note

Effects of media shape on milling kinetics

N.S. Lameck *, M.H. Moys
School of Process and Materials Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, Johannesburg, WITS 2050, South Africa

Received 31 August 2005; accepted 7 December 2005

Available online 15 February 2006

Abstract

Spherical balls are the dominant grinding media used in ball mills. However, balls which are initially spherical, wear into non-
spherical fragments. The proportion of worn, non-spherical balls in the charge of a mill fed with 50 mm balls is dominant in ball sizes
less than 30 mm. Their effects on mill performance in terms of material breakage are not yet established.
The variations of specific rate of breakage with single size feed and fractional filling U, were studied for the two media shapes
(spherical and worn balls). Higher breakage rates were noted with spherical media than worn balls but the differences narrow with
decreasing feed size and increasing material fractional filling, U.
 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Grinding; Comminution; Breakage kinetics; Grinding media

1. Introduction This work focuses on investigating the impact of worn

Spherical balls are the dominant media shape used in the
tumbling mills. However spherical balls wear into non-
spherical fragments as a result of breakage due to impact
and different wearing mechanisms inside the mill. Thus at
any one time a mill charge is a mixture ranging from larger
spherical balls to worn irregular fragments (Banisi et al.,
2000; Vermeulen and Howat, 1989). To date, not much
has been done to assess the impact of worn balls on mill
performance.
It would be expected that increased surface contact by
polygonal balls and flat chips (compared to only point con-
tact that is made by spherical media) ideally should pro-
mote increased grinding by attrition. On the other hand,
worn balls may pack closely thus reducing the void space
available for material to be ground. The larger surface area
per unit mass of polygonal (worn) media may also result in
more effective support of the media by the ore, leading to
reduced media–media forces in the grinding zones.
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +27 11 717 7558; fax: +27 11 403 1471.
E-mail address: nlameck@prme.wits.ac.za (N.S. Lameck).
balls on milling kinetics and assesses whether the effect of
worn balls on mill performance requires any action to
maintain maximum mill productivity. In the study, two
media shapes are considered: spherical and worn balls.
2. Experimental equipment and programme
Experiments were conducted using a 0.54 m internal
diameter laboratory mill. The mill is 0.4 m internal length
fitted with twelve 20 mm high trapezoidal lifters with 45
face angle and 50 mm base width. The mill is driven by a
2.5 kW variable speed motor mounted on a mill rig and
has been described previously (Moys et al., 1996). The mill
filled with balls to 20% by volume was operated at 75%
critical speed. Single sized feed quartz (300 · 425,
600 · 860 and 1180 · 1700 lm) was used at 20%, 50%
and 80% fractional filling, U.
Perfectly spherical balls in various size ranges were used
to conduct experiments. The worn media were obtained
from an industrial dry ball mill used by ESKOM (South
Africa power utility) to produce pulverized fuel following
an experiment done to characterise ball size and shape
distribution (Lameck, 2005). The typical characteristic

0892-6875/$ - see front matter  2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.mineng.2005.12.008
1378 N.S. Lameck, M.H. Moys / Minerals Engineering 19 (2006) 1377–1379

features of industrial ball shape distribution are shown in 1

Fig. 1. It was clearly observed that balls below 31 mm,
which constituted about 15–40% of the sample, are no
longer spherical. Thirty millimeter top size balls were
used-all perfectly spherical or all non-spherical in the two

Wi (t)
ball loads used. The balls size distribution used in experi- 0.1
ments was decided based on this experiment as well.
Material properties such as coefficient of friction, size Worn balls (1180x1700 µm)
Spheres (1180x1700 µm)
and shape affect media packing (Zhou et al., 2002). With Worn balls (600x850 µm)
this fact in consideration, spherical balls charge mass was Spheres (600x850 µm)
calculated by assuming the voidage of 0.4 at the desired 0.01
0 1 2 3 4 5
mill filling level. The charge mass involving worn balls Time (Min)
was equivalent to that of spherical balls. This implies that
media shapes were compared based on the same mass Fig. 2. First order plot of batch ball milling of quartz.
criterion.

3. Discussion of results Fractional filling, U (600x850 μm)

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

The results presented in Fig. 2 compare the first order 10 10

Specific rate of breakage (Min-1)

plot of quartz with feed size of 1180 · 1700 lm and
600 · 850 lm for spherical and worn grinding media Worn balls
shapes. The results suggested that, for the two media Spheres
shapes studied, breakage followed first order.
The variation of specific rate of breakage with feed sizes 1 1
shown in Fig. 3 (bottom axis), indicated that spherical
media have higher breakage rate but the difference narrows
as the feed becomes finer.
It is understood that larger particles undergo impact
breakage when impacted by balls with sufficient kinetic 0.1 0.1
energy. As particles get smaller, they become difficult to 100 1000 10000
break by impact hence breakage rates decrease with Particle size, U = 0.8 (μm)
decreasing particle size. Considering the two media
Fig. 3. Variation of specific rate of breakage with particle size and
charges, worn balls have surface, linear and point contacts
fractional filling.
while spheres have only point contact. This might lead one
to expect increased breakage by abrasion for worn balls.
On the other hand, the use of test screens in sizing the screen size class, the non-spherical (worn) media consti-
media might be the factor accounting for higher breakage tuted heavier balls as relatively bigger balls could easily
rate for spherical media with coarse feed. For the same reorient and pass through the screen aperture. To maintain

Fig. 1. Characteristic feature of balls inside ball mill.

 N.S. Lameck, M.H. Moys / Minerals Engineering 19 (2006) 1377–1379
an equal total mass and the same screens mass fractions,
1489 worn balls were used compared to 1758 spherical
balls. The increased spherical balls number results in more
ball-to-ball and ball to liner collisions for spherical balls
than worn balls, which results in higher catastrophic break-
age by impact for larger particle sizes. While the trend
observed shown faster breakage rate with spherical media,
Ipek (2006) comparison of spherical media and cylpebs
suggested that cylpebs have higher rate of breakage than
spheres.
The variations in specific rates of breakage, S with frac-
tional fillings U were studied using 600 · 850 lm material
feed size (Fig. 3, top axis). It was observed that the specific
rate of breakage decreased with increasing fractional filling,
U.
Austin et al. (1984) equation relating specific rate of
breakage, S with particle size xi when xi  d (d is ball
diameter) was extended to include the effect of fractional
filling U and Eq. (1) was obtained as representative of
the effect of feed size and interstitial filling have on specific
rate of breakage.
S i ¼ a0 xai ExpðkU Þ; ð1Þ
0 Lameck, N.S. 2005. Effects of grinding media shapes on ball mill
where a is proportionality constant resulting from Austin
et al. (1984) equation and the effect of mill filling.
4. Conclusion
Spherical balls have slightly higher rates of breakage
than worn balls. For normal operating material fractional
filling (0.8 < U 6 1.0), the specific rates of breakage for sin-
gle size feed of 600 · 850 lm were similar for the two
shapes, but for lower material fractional filling, higher rates
1379
were observed with spherical media. The difference is more
significant with coarse feed.
However considering that worn balls in industrial mill
charge constitute about 15–40% and that only marginal
differences in breakage rate was observed, the effect of
the presence of worn balls inside the mill charge is negligi-
bly small. Thus, the benefit that can be obtained does not
justify the cost of their removal from mills.
Acknowledgement
The authors acknowledge the financial support from Es-
kom without which this work would not have been
possible.
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