Abstract
Stirred mill technology dates back to 1928 where the idea to use "an agitator and spherical grinding media" was presented. In the context of the mining industry, interest in stirred milling technologies has grown over the last 20 years where the typical observation reported in the literature is that in certain circumstances, stirred milling is significantly more efficient than ball milling.
Despite these developments, the tumbling mills are continuing to be used in fine and ultrafine grinding applications. The main reason fro this, as communicated at the Canadian Mineral Processors round table discussion in 2013, is that the comfort level in understanding stirred milling technologies is not at the level of that of tumbling mills.
At CMP 2014, one contribution as made to explore how mill design affects power and energy in a stirred mill. While the 2015 paper explored the application of one scale-up methodology to the Gibraltar case. For the CMP 2016, the aim of this paper is to contribute to increasing the general comfort level with stirred milling technologies by developing a better understanding of the different scale-up methodologies used. This will be accomplished by first completing an overview of the scale-up models found in the literature followed by a review of the different testing and scale-up procedures. This review will be supported by a number of case studies found in the literature. The paper will close with a discussion on some of the challenges that these models have and how future research might contribute to overcoming them.