Abstract:
The Pulang Copper Mine uses vertical ball mills to regrind coarse concentrates, which encounters problems such as high loss of roundness and overloading of steel balls, poor grinding fineness, and short service life of liners. To improve the grinding efficiency of this vertical ball mill, the grinding effects of nanoceramic balls and steel balls were comparatively studied in this investigation. The results showed that the grinding performance of the vertical mill was significantly improved after adopting nanoceramic balls as the grinding media, with the content of −300 mesh particle size in the ground product increasing by nearly 8 percentage points. Moreover, the grinding costs were significantly reduced after adopting nanoceramic balls as the grinding media. Specifically, the consumption of grinding media was decreased by 82.32%, the cost of liner usage was dropped by 63.83%, and energy consumption was reduced by 25.71%. Therefore, replacing steel balls with nanoceramic balls could effectively enhance the grinding efficiency in the Pulang Copper Mine Concentrator.