Powder Technology 395 (2022) 226–234

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Powder Technology

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/powtec

Impact energy of particles in ball mills based on DEM simulations

and data-driven approach
C.T. Jayasundara, H.P. Zhu ⁎
School of Engineering, Design and Built Environment, Western Sydney University, Locked bag 1797, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The discrete element method has been used to simulate the particle flow in a ball mill under different operating
Received 19 June 2021 conditions. The model was validated by comparing the simulated results of the flow pattern and input power
Received in revised form 2 September 2021 with those measured from a same-scale laboratory mill. The impact energy of the particles under different oper-
Accepted 20 September 2021
ating conditions was analysed in detail. The results showed that the impact energy was affected by the operating
Available online 24 September 2021
conditions of the mill and can be linked to the grinding rate for a given material. The correlation between impact
Keywords:
energy and grinding rate follows first-order grinding kinetics. Mill performance decreases with increasing mill
Discrete element method size. Furthermore, a data-driven machine learning framework has been proposed to predict the impact energy
Ball mill for different operating conditions. It was found that the prediction for mills with diameters of 2000 and
Impact energy 3000 mm based on the training model developed by mills with diameter less than 254 mm could be achieved
Machine learning with an accuracy of 80% and a correlation coefficient of 0.9. Through the combination of DEM simulation and
Grinding rate data-driven approach, the computing time required in the determination of impact energy for large scale mills
can be dramatically reduced.
© 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction [6] proposed a scale-up procedure based on the population balance

Ball mill is one of the most commonly used mills for the crushing and
grinding of mineral ore. It is generally used to grind material down to
the particle size of 20 to 75 μm and can vary in size from a small batch
mill up to a mill with outputs of hundreds of tonnes per hour. The
final stages of comminution are generally performed in ball mills
which can be operated under dry or wet conditions. Any slight improve-
ment in grinding efficiency will be of immense economic benefit as
grinding is a low efficient (< 20%, typically) and power intensive pro-
cess which may account for up to 40% of the direct operating cost of a
mineral processing plant [1]. Thus, it is crucial to improve the grinding
process efficiency by selecting the optimum operating conditions.
The operation process of comminution has been studied in the past
based on data gathered from various ores and semi-empirical models
[2]. The pioneer of the study was Bond and the equation proposed by
him is known as the Bond's grinding equation [3,4]. As the Bond equa-
tion did not consider breakage kinetics, all the effects in grinding were
lumped into the work index. To overcome the limits of the energy
based work index, the population balance method (PBM) was intro-
duced later and became popular in the 1970s [5]. Herbst and Fuerstenau
⁎ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: h.zhu@westernsydney.edu.au (H.P. Zhu).
models (PBMs), which considers particle breakage, transport and classi-
fication. This method allows product size distribution prediction and,
when properly normalized with respect to energy, provides an
energy-product size distribution relation. The PBM has been demon-
strated to provide a much superior prediction of grinding performance
than the empirical Bond work index model [5,7]. However, due to the
lack of information on mechanical interactions between particles (i.e.
micro-scale interactions), assumptions are often required in the appli-
cation of the empirical methods.
With the advancement in computing resources, a numerical model
based on the discrete element method (DEM) has been used to simulate
the motion of particles in grinding mills. The DEM treats the particle
flow as an assembly of particles and computes the movement of each
particle according to Newton's second law of motion. The interactions
between particles and between particles and the drum in a system are
determined based on the well-established contact mechanics. Since
Mishra and Rajamani conducted a DEM study of grinding, this method
has been used to study different milling processes, including ball mills
[7–11] and high speed stirred mills [12,13]. While the DEM simulations
have been used for small systems to implement breakage of ground par-
ticles [14–16], direct simulation of particle breakage in a relatively large
system, especially, at an industrial scale, is still beyond the capability of
current computing resources. Alternatively, microdynamic properties
and their link with the grinding rate have been studied using the

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.powtec.2021.09.063
0032-5910/© 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
C.T. Jayasundara and H.P. Zhu Powder Technology 395 (2022) 226–234

DEM. Through this, the DEM simulation results can be indirectly applied
for particle breakage processes. Recent studies showed that stirred mills
under a dry condition follow first-order grinding kinetics and the rate
constant can be linked with impact energy [17,18]. Similar correlations
were also reported for planetary ball mills [19,20]. This method provides
a way to predict the grinding rate of a given material under given oper-
ating conditions provided that the number of particles is within the
computing capability. However, there is no report on the study of the
correlation between impact energy and grinding rate with varying
mill sizes, which is an important issue for simulations of grinding pro-
cess of large mills.
Although a tremendous growth in computational power has been
observed in the past, transient simulations of dynamic systems, using
physics based numerical methods such as the DEM are prohibitively ex-
pensive for large practical applications. A great deal of opportunity ex-
ists if we can efficiently learn the behaviour of the small system and
then forecast it in different operating conditions. However, based on
the smaller system, a simple linear regression cannot be established
for larger systems with the presence of multiple independent variables
and the complexity of scale dependant variables. This can be overcome
by the machine learning (ML) technique. ML has emerged as one of the
most promising technology in the past decade due to its capability to
provide valuable insights into complex systems. It enables learning
from many features (independent input variables) along with advanced
feature engineering, which leads to robust predictions of systems with
complex phenomena. It has been shown that ML-based predictions
are more accurate than linear regression techniques [21,22]. The prom-
ise of machine learning has been explored in a variety of scientific disci-
plines including computationally transient models [23]. Although a
limited number of machine learning models have been used in grinding
mills to predict various process parameters, none of the work has been
reported to investigate the effect of operating conditions and scale on
mill performance using machine learning methods.
The objective of this study is to link the grinding rate to impact en-
ergy for different mill sizes and overcome the limitations on the deter-
mination of the impact energy associated with DEM simulations for
large scale grinding mills by applying machine learning models. The ef-
fect of different operating conditions of the ball mill on particle flow was
first investigated in terms of microdynamic variables related to flow
structure such as velocity, impact energy and collision frequency. The
relation between the grinding rate constant and impact energy was
then established. After that, exploratory data analysis was conducted
to explore the correlations among the specific impact energy and oper-
ating conditions. Finally, the impact energy of large systems based on
the predictive data model was studied.
2. DEM model and simulation conditions
The DEM model used in this work is based on the soft-sphere model
which has been extensively used to study various phenomena, such as
particle packing, transport properties, hopper flow, mixing and granula-
tion [24]. The soft-sphere model is more suitable for systems such as
grinding mills because the model is capable of handling more than
one contact at a time. The motion of particles is described by Newton's
laws of motion. The governing equations for the translational and rota-
tional motion of particle i with mass mi and moment of inertia Ii can be
written as:
where vi, ωi and Ii are, respectively, the translational velocity, angular
velocity and moment of inertia of the particle, g is the gravitational
acceleration, and Ri was a vector running from the centre of the
particle to the contact point with its magnitude equal to particle
radius Ri. Fijn, Fijs and Mrij represent, respectively, the normal contact
force, tangential contact force and rolling friction imposed on particle i
by particle j. Here, we use the simplified Hertz–Mindlin and Deresiewicz
model where contact forces are given by [25–27].
 pffiffiffi pffiffiffiqffiffiffiffiffi 
2 3 
F nij ¼ E Rξn 2 −γn E R ξn vij  nij nij ð3Þ
3
and
h
  i
3
F sij ¼ −sgn ðξs Þμ F nij 1− 1− min ξs , ξs, max =ξs, max Þ2 ð4Þ


where E = Y= 1−σ e 2 , and Y and σ
e are, respectively, Young's modulus
and Poisson ratio; ξn is the overlap between particles i and j; nij is a unit
vector running from the centre of particle j to the centre of particle i; R ¼
R=2 for mono-sized particle; and vij is the relative velocity of particles i
and j at contact. The normal damping constant, γn, is the material
property directly linked to the coefficient of restitution e. ξs and ξs,max
are, respectively, the total and maximum tangential displacements
of particles during contact. The rolling friction is given by −min {μr|
Fnij|, μr|ωnij|}ωnij, where μr is the rolling friction coefficient, and ωnij is the
component of the vector of the relative angular velocity of particles i
and j in their contact plane [28].
Simulations were carried out in the ball mills with the same geome-
try and operating conditions as used in the literature [29]. The mill di-
ameters are 127 mm, 254 mm and 508 mm where the mill length to
diameter ratio is 1.15. Each mill consists of eight lifters. Three levels of
steel balls of 12.7 mm, 19.05 mm, 25.4 mm and 31.75 mm diameters
were used as the grinding media. The filling levels M* was taken as
30%, 40% and 50% of full mill and the mill speed N* was selected as
0.5, 0.6 and 0.7 of the critical speed. The critical speed is the speed at
which a mill drum rotates such that balls are stick to the drum, which
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
is given by 2g=ðD−dÞ where D and d are the mill diameter and parti-
cle diameter in meters respectively. For this work, only the motion of
grinding media was simulated without considering the ore charge.
The ore charge was considered entrapped in between colliding balls
which were subjected to the collision forces. The parameters used in
the simulations are given in Table 1. Sliding friction and restitution coef-
ficients affect the input power of particle systems [30]. To determine
their values for the mill considered, different values have been
attempted until a comparative input power with the experiment [29]
was achieved. Particle density is the same as that in the experiment.
Young's modulus was selected based on the previous simulations for
the soft sphere DEM model [31].
Table 1
Physical parameters used in the simulations.
Parameter Value
Ball density, ρ (kgm−3) 8050
Young's modulus, Y (Nm−2) 2.0 × 107
Poisson ratio, σ e 0.3
sliding friction coefficient, μs 0.4
Rolling friction coefficient, μr (d) 0.01

dvi
 Restitution coefficient, e 0.68

mi ¼ ∑ F nij þ F sij þ mi g ð1Þ Particle diameter, d (mm) and maximum 12.7 (110000), 19.05 (120000),
dt number of particles used in the simulation 25.4 (69638), 31.75 (35000)
(given in the brackets)
and Mill diameter, D (mm) 127, 254, 508, 2000, 3000
Mill speed as a fraction of critical speed N* 0.5, 0.6, 0.7
dωi

Fill level fraction M* 0.3, 0.4, 0.5
Ii ¼ ∑ Ri  F sij þ M rij ð2Þ
dt Numerical time step (s) 1.0 × 10−5

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C.T. Jayasundara and H.P. Zhu
In each simulation, particles were randomly generated in the milling
vessel and allowed to settle under gravity. The mill was then rotated
clockwise and allowed to reach the steady state before data collection
began. In this work, the steady state was believed to be reached when
the variation of space average particle velocity was insignificant.
When the system was in a steady state, data collection started for
two complete revolutions of the mill. Both particle-particle and
particle-wall collisions were collected to calculate total impact energy
and collision frequency. The impact energy for a collision was defined
as the kinetic energy, given by ½mijv2ij, where mij = 2mimj/(mi + mj)
and vij(=|vi − vj|) is the relative normal collision velocity between
two contacted particles i and j. For the collision between a particle and
the drum, the impact energy was calculated by ½mi|vi|2. A contact was
counted when the overlap occurred for the first time. Existing overlap
was not considered as a new contact until it separated and come into
contact again.
The results obtained from the DEM simulations under different op-
erating conditions have been used to develop the ML model. The mill
was characterized by 4 input features: mill diameter, mill rotating
speed (percentage of critical speed), fill volume and particle size. The ef-
fect of material properties such as particle density, rolling friction coef-
ficient, sliding friction coefficient was not considered. As the input data
have different varying ranges, they were first normalized, before being
fed into the model, by
ðx−xmin Þ
xscaled ¼
ðxmax −xmin Þ
where x, xmin and xmax are the original feature and the minimum and
maximum values of the original feature, respectively.
The accuracy of the model is determined by the mean absolute per-
centage error

 Once they reach the lower region of the drum, the balls again move
1 n y −z
accuracy ¼ 100∗ 1− ∑ i i
n i¼1 yi
where yi, zi and n is the target value obtained from the DEM, predicted
value from the model and the sample size, respectively. The correlation
coefficient between two variables ai and bi is given by


∑ðai −aÞ bi −b
r ¼ rffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi

2 ð7Þ
∑ðai −aÞ2 ∑ bi −b
where a and b are the means of ai and bi, respectively.
Four different popular ML methods, including linear regression (LR),
partial least square regression (PLS), elastic net regression (EN) and ran-
dom forest regression (RF), were tested to build the predictive model.
Hyperparameter tuning has been used to improve the accuracy of the
models. Hyperparameter tuning is an essential aspect of the machine
Fig. 1. Flow patterns in ball mills with different sizes: (a) 127 mm; (b) 254 mm; (c) 508 mm; (d) 2000 mm; and (e) 3000 mm, when d = 25.4 mm, M* = 0.5 and N* = 0.6.
Powder Technology 395 (2022) 226–234
learning model to identify the optimal parameter settings. The best
method to determine the optimal settings is to try many different com-
binations and evaluate the performance of each model. Under-fitting
occurs when the model does not fit the data well and is unable to cap-
ture the underlying trend in which a low accuracy is observed in the
training and test dataset. To the contrary, over-fitting occurs when the
model fits the data too well, capturing all the noises. In this situation,
high accuracy can be observed in the training dataset, whereas the
same model will result in a low accuracy on the unseen dataset. There-
fore, cross-validation has been used for the hyperparameter optimiza-
tion here. This is a standard practice for hyperparameter optimization,
whose detail can be found in [32].
3. Results and discussion
3.1. Flow pattern
Fig. 1 shows the particle flow of different size of mills when M* = 0.5
and N* = 0.6 at the steady state. The colour in the figure represents the
particle velocity. Note that the DEM simulations are only for the grind-
ing media without considering the ground (fine) particles. Compared
to the grinding media, the number of ground particles is significantly
less and the effect of the fine particles on the grinding media is insignif-
icant [20,33]. The motions of balls for different mill diameters are similar
ð5Þ at the same fraction of critical speed, which is identical to that observed
by other scholars [33,34,37] for a tumbling ball mill. The balls near the
bottom are lifted by the lifters and dragged up around the liner. They
lose contact with the drum in the second quadrant and most of the
balls then flow down the steep free surface into the horizontal toe re-
gion. This is generally described as the cascading part of the flow.
up towards the upper region. The particles reach a peak velocity just
ð6Þ
below the centre of the mill. The next highest velocity cluster of particles
are the ones rotating with the mill near the shell. There is a semi-circular
band indicated by the light blue of particles that move quite slowly. This
behaviour is generally observed in ball mills when they operate below
the critical speed [34]. When the mill size increases, the particles are
raised to a higher elevation and then drop under gravity, promoting a
higher velocity.
To further examine the effect of mill size on particle velocity, Fig. 2
shows the probability distribution (PDF) of particle velocity at different
critical speed fractions. The profiles of the distribution are similar for all
cases considered. It increases, reaches a peak, and then decreases with
the increase of the velocity. When mill size increases distribution be-
comes wider suggesting more particles with higher velocity. When
the mill size increases, the particle velocity increases because of a high
percentage of particles having higher velocity in the middle region
close to the centre of the mill where the cascading flow can be observed.
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C.T. Jayasundara and H.P. Zhu Powder Technology 395 (2022) 226–234

Fig. 2. Probability distribution and mean velocity for different mill sizes at different fractions of critical speed: (a) N* = 0.5; (b) N* = 0.6; and (c) N* = 0.7. v is the mean velocity of particles.

When mill speed increases particles obtain higher velocity. As a result,
mean velocity increases with increasing mill size or mill speed.
3.2. Impact energy, collision frequency and input power
increases at a higher rate than total impact energy in the system.
Fig. 4b shows the effect of critical speed and fill volume on Ei. for given
particle size and mill size. When filling volume increases, Ei decreases.
This is because the total mass increase is higher than the rate of

When the mill is in operation, impact energy between particle-

particle and particle-wall contributes to the liberation of fine powder.
The amount of release of the fine powder depends on the intensity
and the frequency of the impact energy. Fig. 3a shows the variation of
collision frequency with impact energy per unit time for different
sizes of mills when d = 25.4 mm, M* = 0.5 and N* = 0.6. The impact
energy per unit time was calculated by dividing the total impact energy
by the simulation time. Both particle-particle and particle-wall colli-
sions were divided into bins of different values of impact energy, and
each energy class was plotted as collisions per second which give the
collision frequency. Generally, particle-particle impact energy is smaller
in magnitude than particle-wall impact energy because the bulk of the
particles are closely packed which limits the relative velocity among
particles. Particle-wall impacts tend to have higher impact energies
caused by the cataracting particles which fall onto the toe region with
a higher velocity. A high number of particle-particle collisions contrib-
ute to the smooth variation whereas a low number of particle-wall col-
lisions contribute towards the tail where a spiky variation can be
observed. When milling size increases, distribution shifts to right sug-
gesting that total impact energy increases with increasing mill size be-
cause of an increased number of particles in larger mills. However,
impact energy per particle and collision frequency per particles de-
crease with increasing mill size (Fig. 3b). Although a high number of im-
pacts are observed at low energies, all the impacts may not be useful for
feed powder breakage. Impact energy should be high enough to initiate
crack propagation even under repeated impacts [18]. For each ground
material, there exists a threshold impact energy which is a function of
particle size and material properties. The work reported by Capece
et al. [18] observed that the size-specific impact energy threshold was
calculated to be 2.64 × 10−5 J based on the size-independent energy
threshold. In this analysis, we did not consider impacts less than
2.5 × 10−5 J as useful impacts.
The impact energy is affected by the operating conditions of the mill.
To illustrate this, Fig. 4a shows the effect of particle size and mill size on
specific impact energy Ei for a given critical speed (N* = 0.6) and fill
volume (M* = 0.5). The specific impact energy of particles is the total
impact energy per unit time divided by the particle mass. Note that
two additional cases have been included when considering the effect
of each property except particle diameter to show the trend of
variation more clearly. When particle size increases, Ei increases
because of increased individual particle mass which contributes to the Fig. 3. Impact energy and collision frequency for different size of mills when d = 25.4 mm,
calculation of impact energy among particles. When mill size M* = 0.5 and N* = 0.6: (a) impact energy per unit time and collision frequency; and
increases, Ei decreases because of total particle mass in the system (b) variations of impact energy and collision frequency per particle with mill size.

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C.T. Jayasundara and H.P. Zhu
Fig. 4. Variation of specific impact energy: (a) with mill size when M* = 0.5, N* = 0.6, and
d = 25.4 mm, and with particle size when M* = 0.5, N* = 0.6 and D = 254 mm; (b) with
percentage of critical speed when d = 25.4 mm, D = 254 mm and M* = 0.5, and with fill
volume when d = 12.4 mm, D = 254 mm and N* = 0.6.
increase in the total impact energy. When increasing critical speed,
relative velocity among particles increases. As a result, higher critical
speed promotes higher Ei.
The energy required to drive the mill varies depending on the ore
type, properties of grinding media and operating conditions such as
mill speed and fill volume, which means that input power is system de-
pendant. Mill input power was calculated based on the torque gener-
ated by those particles which were colliding with the mill drum. For
each time step, individual torques were summed from the contributing
particles to obtain the instantaneous torque on the mill. Those particles
which are not in contact (free flight) do not contribute to torque until
they meet the mill drum. Instantaneous power consumption is the
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Powder Technology 395 (2022) 226–234
product of the total torque with angular mill speed (in rad/s), and it
has an impulsive nature. Here, the average power was calculated and
compared with the experimental power draw.
Fig. 5a shows the comparison of specific input power Pi (i.e., the
input power per unit time per unit mass) based on the simulations ob-
tained from the experiments by Malghan [29]. The values of Pi from
simulations and experiments for different sized mills are very close.
There is a linear relationship between specific input power and mill
size in log-log scale, which indicates that Pi is proportional to Dn
where n = 2.6 which is within the range reported in the experiments
[3,35]. The result suggests that input power obtained from small scale
mills can be extrapolated for large scale mills. The good agreement
with the experimental values, combined with the qualitative
agreements with previous studies [33,34,37] in terms of flow patterns
discussed in Section 3.1, demonstrates the validity of the DEM model.
A more extensive validation of the DEM code used in this work has
been conducted in our previous study [31]. Fig. 5b shows the ratio of
specific impact energy to specific input power γ for different mill
sizes. γ gives a measure of grinding performance [17]. When mill size in-
creases, γ decreases, which indicates that the rate of increase of Pi is
higher than the rate of increase of Ei. This is because the bulk of the
material need to be lifted to a higher elevation for a larger mill size, so
the energy per unit mass required is higher. As a result, when mill size
is increased, Pi increases at a higher rate than Ei. The results suggest
that under the same operating conditions (when M* and N* are
identical), grinding performance decreases with increasing mill size.
Other operating conditions with different fill volumes and critical
speeds also follow the same trend. However, larger mills have higher
throughput than smaller mills because of increased mill capacity.
Therefore, the selection of an optimum operating condition is a
compromise between mill performance and throughput.
3.3. Grinding rate constant and impact energy relation
Experiments reported by Malghan [29] for different sizes of ball mills
were analysed to obtain the grinding rate of calcium carbonate as
ground material and steel balls as grinding media. Cumulative particle
size distribution curve was plotted and used to obtain the particle size
for 50% cumulative passing level for a given time which was known as
D50,t. This procedure was repeated for all the experiments. When
grinding time t increases, the rate of size reduction decreases. The
relationship between size reduction and grinding time can be
approximated by an exponential function. When grinding time
increases, Dt/Dt0 tends to level off reaching the lowest value which is
known as the grinding limit Dt∞. Here Dt is the particle size at time t
and Dt0 is the initial particle size. Then the relationship between
(D50,t − D50,∞)/(D50,0 − D50,∞) vs grinding time t can be given as
ðD50,t −D50,∞ Þ
= e−Kpt, where Kp is known as grinding rate [17,36].
ðD50,0 −D50,∞ Þ
Fig. 6 shows log-linear plot of (D50,t − D50,∞)/(D50,0 − D50,∞) vs
grinding time t which shows straight lines. Though different slopes are
observed for different mill sizes under different operating conditions,
the grinding rate increases with increasing mill size. This confirms
that the grinding process of the ball mill follows the first-order kinetics,
and the particle size decays exponentially with time. Similar observa-
tions were reported for dry and wet grinding of different mills such as
the stirred mill and planetary ball mill [17,20].
While DEM modelling of particle flow provides a significant amount
of information at the particle scale, simulating particle breakage for an
actual grinding process under industrial-scale large systems consisting
of trillions of fine particles is beyond the capability of current computing
resources. Alternatively, establishing a correlation between impact en-
ergy and grinding rate provides a way of eliminating the simulation of
fine particles. In the previous studies [17,19,20,36], it has been shown
that there is a link between grinding rate and impact energy for given
grinding materials under different mill speeds and fill volume. However,
C.T. Jayasundara and H.P. Zhu Powder Technology 395 (2022) 226–234

Fig. 5. (a) Comparison between the simulations and experiments [29] in terms of specific input power vs mill size; and (b) the variation of the ratio of specific impact energy to input power
with mill size for different N* when M* = 0.5 and d = 25.4 mm.

this correlation has not been examined for ball mills with varying mill
sizes and other operating conditions. Fig. 7 shows the correlation be-
tween specific impact energy and grinding rate in a log-log plot based
on the simulations of the three sized mills. Specific impact energy has
been noted by researchers in comminution as a major factor in rock
fracture. High specific impact energy promotes a higher grinding rate
[37]. The correlation suggests that grinding rate can be predicted for
any given mill size provided that the specific impact energy is known.
However, as mentioned above, simulating a large number of particles
using physics-based DEM modelling remains prohibitively expensive.
Alternatively, a data-driven approach can be utilized to determine im-
pact energy for large systems.

3.4. Correlations among input features and impact energy

Exploratory data analysis is an important step in the machine learn-

ing model because it can help identify obvious errors, better understand
patterns within the data, detect outliers or anomalous events, and find
Fig. 7. Correlation between specific impact energy and grinding rate for different operating
interesting relations among the variables. This procedure mainly exam-
conditions: mill size, mill speed, fill volume and particle size.
ines the correlation coefficient among input features and the

distribution of each input feature. Table 2 shows the correlations

among input features and specific impact energy Ei. Generally,
correlation coefficient r measures the degree of linearity between two
variables and it varies between −1 to 1. A positive correlation means
a direct linear relationship and a negative correlation means an inverse
linear relationship between the two variables. Positive correlations be-
tween N* and Ei, and d and Ei suggest that increase in mill speed or
particle diameter would increase the specific impact energy. Negative
correlations between M* and Ei, and D and Ei suggest that increase in
fill volume or mill diameter would decrease the specific impact

Table 2
Correlation among input features and specific impact energy.

d D M* N* Ei

d 1 0.071 0.047 −0.005 0.307

D 0.071 1 0.198 −0.058 −0.247
M* 0.047 0.198 1 −0.013 −0.630
N* −0.005 −0.058 −0.013 1 0.609
Fig. 6. Normalized particle sizes of calcium carbonate ground samples as a function of
Ei 0.307 −0.247 −0.630 0.609 1
grinding time for different mill sizes when M* = 0.5 and N* = 0.6.

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energy. Since all the four input features show low r (<0.7) with Ei, it
can be expected that these input features have nonlinear relationships
with Ei.
Furthermore, the effect of input features on specific impact energy
has been examined through box plots given in Fig. 8. Box plots show
the distribution of the specific impact energy with each variable. The
box ranges from the first quartile (Q1) to the third quartile (Q3) of the
distribution, and the range represents the interquartile range (IQR).
The median is indicated by a line across the box. The whiskers on
the box plot extend from Q1 and Q3 to the most extreme data points
which give the range of the data points. If the median is in the middle
of a box, and the upper and lower whiskers have the same length, the
distribution is symmetric. It can be seen that most of the box plots
show asymmetric distributions, which suggests that data may have
complex characteristics. An increase and then decrease in median
values of d and D suggest a strong nonlinearity with the specific im-
pact energy. However, the median value of M* shows a decrease
whereas that of N* shows an increase, which suggests that M* and
N* have a weaker nonlinear correlation with E i, than d and D.
Therefore, the values of r of M* and N* are higher than those of d
and D. The exploratory data analysis based on Table 2 and Figs. 8
showed that the correlations between the specific impact energy
and input features were nonlinear. The selected machine learning
model should be able to capture the nonlinear behaviour with
acceptable accuracy.
Fig. 8. Distribution of specific impact energy with each input feature: (a) particle diameter; (b) mill diameter; (c) mill speed; (d) fill volume.
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3.5. Impact energy of large systems based on the predictive data model
Due to the computing cost associated with the acquisition of DEM
data, we investigated the minimum size of training data required for
reasonable accuracy. Dataset based on 108 cases was randomly divided
into different subsets of training data varying from 43, 54, 64, 76, 86 and
97 which approximately correspond to 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80% and 90%
of the total data, respectively. The trained models were used to predict
the specific impact energy for large mills of D = 2000 mm and
3000 mm with three levels of d, N* and M* of each operating condition
which gives 54 different cases. Then the predicted values for D ≥ 2000
were compared with the simulation ones, and the accuracy for each
case was calculated by using Eq. 6. Fig. 9 shows the accuracy of different
number of training data for the four models. None of the models showed
a significant improvement in the accuracy beyond 86 training data,
which indicates that 86 data for training and 22 data for testing can be
used for the model development. Among the four methods, random for-
est performs the best, with an accuracy of 80% for the prediction of spe-
cific power for large scale mills (D ≥ 2000 mm).
Fig. 10 shows the scatter plot of comparison between actual and pre-
dicted specific impact energy based on the four ML methods when 86
data sample was used for training. When D ≤ 508 mm, all four models
show data points close to the dotted line. However, when D = 2000
or 3000 mm, models LR, PLS and EN show scattered data which results
in a low r (= 0.27 for LR and PLS, and 0.28 for EN). Compared to the
C.T. Jayasundara and H.P. Zhu Powder Technology 395 (2022) 226–234

three models, RF shows a significantly higher value of r (= 0.9). The re-

Fig. 9. Comparison of accuracy of different number of training data for linear regression
(LR), partial least square regression (PLS), elastic net regression (EN), and random forest
regression (RF).
sults given in Figs. 9 and 10 suggest that random forest model gives a
reasonable prediction up to sixfold mill sizes while LR, PL and EN models
are not suitable for predicting extrapolated values. Random forest com-
bines several decision trees and is based on randomized feature selec-
tion [38], which causes that it is capable of handling complex systems
over other models. Moreover, nonlinear nature of random forest can
give it an advantage over other algorithms for the considered system
with nonlinear correlations between specific impact energy and input
features as discussed in Section 3.4. These features may be the reasons
why random forest is much more accurate than other models. It is
noted that further increase of mill size may not perform well, which is
a limitation of the proposed model.
Table 3 shows DEM simulation time for different mill sizes when the
system is at a steady state. Computational time significantly increases
with the number of particles. For instance, the computational time for
D = 508 mm takes about 6 min whereas D = 3000 mm takes about
800 min for a two-second simulation. Therefore, prediction based on
the RF model is a tremendous improvement because it takes only
milliseconds to obtain the results. The other advantage of this model is
that it can be used to predict impact energy for any different operating

Fig. 10. Machine learning predictions of specific impact energy based on different methods: (a) linear regression; (b) partial least square regression; (c) elastic net regression; and
(d) random forest regression. The red dots represent the test data whereas blue dots represent a larger mill with D = 2000 or 3000 mm.

233
C.T. Jayasundara and H.P. Zhu
Table 3
Comparison of computational time for different mill sizes when d = 25.4 mm and
M* = 0.5.
D (mm) Np DEM simulation time (minutes)
254 400 2 cess. Extr. Metall. 80 (1971) C193–C198.
508 1874 6 [6] J.A. Herbst, D.W. Fuerstenau, Scale-up procedure for continuous grinding mill design
2000 30,300 300
3000 69,630 800
combinations provided that the model descriptors are well within the
training data set. Prediction based on 508 mm up to 3000 mm is a signif-
icant achievement because simulation time for 3000 mm is 133 times
the simulation time of D = 508 mm. The framework proposed in this
work will significantly reduce the computational time when predicting
impact energy for large systems and will be a promising technique for
large scale DEM simulations.
4. Conclusions
Numerical modelling based on DEM has been performed on ball
mills of different sizes. It has been shown that the grinding of ball
mills of different sizes follows the first-order kinetics. Although different
collision environments exist with different sizes of mills, impact energy
is a useful index that determines the grinding rate. Regardless of the mill
size, for a given material, a unique correlation exists between impact en-
ergy and the grinding rate constant in which the grinding rate increases
with increasing mill size. When increasing the mill size under similar
dynamic conditions, the rate of increase of specific input energy is
higher than the rate of increase in specific impact energy. As a result,
grinding performance decreases with increasing mill size. However, in
terms of throughput large mills are always the best choice because of in-
creased mill capacity. The impact energy is affected by the operating
conditions of the mill. The specific impact energy increases with an in-
crease in particle size or percentage of critical speed, or with a decrease
in mill size or fill volume. The exploratory data analysis showed that the
correlations between impact energy and input features were nonlinear.
DEM combined with machine learning showed a novel technique for
predicting the grinding rate of large-scale mills based on the data gener-
ated from small scale numerical models. Among different machine
learning methods, random forest performed the best with r = 0.9 and
an accuracy of 80% for the prediction of specific power for large scale
mills (D ≥ 2000 mm). This is a significant improvement in simulating
large-scale mills where numerical modelling has limitations due to a
large number of particles. The results show that relatively high accuracy
can be expected up to sixfold mill sizes. The framework described in this
work in principle can be applied for other types of mills as well.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influ-
ence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the ARC Research Hub for Computational
Particle Technology (IH140100035) and Western Sydney University for
the financial support of this work.
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