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 compared in this investigation. The results show that the grinding performance of the vertical mill is 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 are significantly reduced after adopting nanoceramic balls as the grinding media. Specifically, the consumption of grinding media is decreased by 82.32%, the cost of liner usage is reduced by 63.83%, and energy consumption is reduced by 25.71%. Therefore, replacing steel balls with nanoceramic balls could effectively enhance the grinding efficiency in the Pulang Copper Mine Concentrator.