Dry grinding in planetary ball mills: Evaluation of a stressing model

Abstract Planetary ball mills at laboratory scale are widely used for grinding and alloying processes. However, in contrast to other mill types, no applicable mechanistic model exists to describe the stressing conditions and their effect on particle breakage, so that processes are empirically evaluated so far. Within this study, the stressing conditions are determined by simulations based on the discrete element method including the contact model of Hertz and Mindlin. The contact model parameters are carefully calibrated by a series of experiments, so that it is finally possible to validate the simulation results by comparison of measured and calculated power values. The correlation of stressing conditions and breakage rates of alumina powder demonstrates the effect of stressing on breakage kinetics and breakage mechanism. It allows calculating the active mass in dependence on process parameters by an extension of Schonert’s active mass model. Altogether, the presented stressing model features analytical functions for the mill-related stressing conditions and highlights the importance of stressing intensity as process determining parameter, which defines the required number of material-related stressing events and the specific energy.