The Effects of Ball Types on Breakage Parameters of Barite

Spherical balls are the dominant media shape used in the tumbling mills. However spherical balls wear into nonspherical 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. There is not much work done to assess the impact of balls on mill performance. An experimental work was made in this study about the effect of media shape on grinding of barite. Existing studies focus on grind performance in ball mills. The absolute fineness of the ball type is important factors for the optimal operation of a ball mill. Therefore, the effects on breakage kinetics of the ball type were investigated on the barite powder at batch grinding conditions based on a kinetic model. For this purpose, firstly, four different fine mono-size fractions were carried out between 0.106 and 0.045 mm formed by av 2 sieve series. Then, Si and Bi,j equations were determined from the size distributions at different grinding times, and the model parameters were compared for three different ball type. The results of tests, the effect of ball type on the grinding were found to be different than other investigators regarding some results.