Correlating common breakage modes with impact breakage and ball milling of cement clinker and chromite

Abstract

Understanding the mechanisms of the breakage of ore particles is important to predict the particle size distribution in size reduction operations. This paper aims to show the presence of common breakage modes in impact breakage and ball milling of the cement clinker and chromite samples. For that purpose, narrow size fractions of the two samples were broken in a drop-weight tester or ball mill by changing the degree of applied energy. Then the resultant size distributions were evaluated to seek evidence for the common breakage modes. The results showed that increasing the breakage energy will produce a systematic change in the shapes of the size distributions, suggesting a sequential set of breakage modes. The breakage is initially due to tensile stresses at low breakage energies and compressive stresses at high breakage energies. Further studies should be done to assess if these breakage modes occur at size-reduction of different ores.

Keywords

• Progeny distribution
• Impact breakage
• Ball mill
• Self-similarity
• Breakage modes
• Cone of fines