Modeling of a grinding circuit with a swing-hammer mill and a twin-cone classifier

A model was formulated for a continuous, air-swept milling system, assuming the mill to be fully mixed, with all particles leaving the mill in the air stream. The air-sweeping effect was treated as an internal classification which allows fine particles to leave and returns coarse particles for regrinding. The kinetic parameters for the continuous model were estimated using experimental data from a continuous pilot-plant air-swept swing-hammer mill. Functional forms that provide information regarding the power, the internal classification action of the mill, and the action of the external classifier, were deduced for different plant conditions. It was found that the specific rates of breakage could be assumed to vary with particle size according to S_i = a(x_i/x_o)^α, where the value of α was 1.3 for the coal used in the tests. The values of a varied with mill hold-up W, giving a maximum of aW as W became large. The primary breakage distribution values were assumed to be normalized, giving a value of characteristic slope of γ = 0.60.