Test Methods for Characterising Ore Comminution Behavior in Geometallurgy

Sammanfattning: Comminution test methods used within mineral processing have mainly been developed for selecting the most appropriate comminution technology for a given ore, designing a grinding circuit as well as sizing the equipment needed. Existing test methods usually require comparatively large sample amounts and are time-consuming to conduct. This makes comprehensive testing of ore comminution behavior – as required in the geometallurgical context – quite expensive. Currently the main interest in the conduct of comminution test lies in the determination of particle size reduction and related energy consumption by grindability test methods, which provide the necessary information about mill throughput. In this procedure mineral liberation is regarded as a fixed parameter due to missing this information in ore characterization as well as a lack of suitable comminution models. However, ignoring the connection between particle size and mineral liberation prevents the scheduling and controlling of the production process from being optimal. For these reasons new comminution tests need to be developed or alternatively the existing test methods need to be suited to geometallurgical testing where the aim is to map the variation of processing properties of an entire ore body. The objective of this research work is on the one hand to develop small-scale comminution test methods that allow linking comminution behavior and liberation characteristics to mineralogical parameters, and on the other hand establish a modeling framework including mineral liberation information. Within the first stage of the study the comminution of drill cores from Malmberget’s magnetite ore, classified by modal mineralogy and texture information, have been investigated. It was found that there is a direct correlation between the mechanical strength of the rock, as received from unconfined compressive or point load tests, and the crusher reduction ratio as a measure for crushability. However, a negative correlation was found between crushability and grindability for the same samples. The grindability showed inverse correlation with both magnetite grade and the magnetite’s mineral grain size. The preliminary conclusion is that modal mineralogy and micro-texture (grain size) can be used to quantitatively describe the ore comminution behavior although the applied fracture mechanism of the mill cannot be excluded. With crushed ore samples from Malmberget also grindability tests and mineral liberation analyses were conducted using laboratory tumbling mills of different size. Starting from the dimensions of the Bond ball mill a modified test method was developed where small size samples of approximately 220 g were pre-crushed and ground in a down-scaled one-stage grindability test. Down-scaling was done by keeping similar impact effects between the mills. Mill speed and grinding time were used for adjusting the number of fracture events in order to receive similar particle size distributions and specific grinding energy when decreasing mill size by the factor 1.63. A detailed description of the novel geometallurgical comminution test (GCT) is given. With respect to ore crushability and autogenous and semiautogenous grinding (AG/SAG) also drop weight tests were conducted. For a more accurate and precise measurement of the energy transferred to the sample a novel instrumented drop weight was used. Initial tests with fractions of drill cores and pre-crushed ore particles showed that the simple energy calculation based on potential energy needs to be corrected. For the future work these tests will be extended to other ore types in order to investigate the effects of mineralogy and to include mineral liberation in comminution models suitable for geometallurgy.