Experimental and Modeling Study of the Regular Polygon Angle-spiral Liner in Ball Mills

Load behavior is one of the most critical factors affecting mills’ energy consumption and grinding efficiency, and is greatly affected by the liner profiles. Generally, as liner profiles vary, the ball mill performances are extremely different. In order to study the performance of the ball mill with regular polygon angle-spiral liners(RPASLs), experimental and numerical studies on three types of RPASLs, including regular quadrilateral, pentagonal and hexagonal, are carried out. For the fine product of desired size, two critical parameters are analyzed: the energy input to the mill per unit mass of the fine product, \(E^{*}\), and the rate of production of the fine product, \(F^{*}\). Results show that the optimal structure of RPASLs is Quadrilateral ASL with an assembled angle of 50\({^{\circ }}\). Under this condition, the specific energy consumption \(E^{*}\) has the minimum value of 303 J per fine product and the production rate \(F^{*}\) has the maximum value of 0.323. The production rate \(F^{*}\) in the experimental result is consistent with the specific collision energy intensity to total collision energy intensity ratio \(E_\mathrm{s}/E_\mathrm{t}\) in the simulation. The relations between the production rate \(F^{*}\) and the specific energy consumption \(E^{*}\) with collision energy intensity \(E_\mathrm{s}\) and \(E_\mathrm{t }\) are obtained. The simulation result reveals the essential reason for the experimental phenomenon and correlates the mill performance parameter to the collision energy between balls, which could guide the practical application for Quadrilateral ASL.