Global mining standards and guidelines for determining comminution circuit efficiency

A Gibblett and M Daniel

ABSTRACT

The Global Mining Standards and Guidelines Group (GMSG) currently supports nine individual industry working groups focused on developing standards and guidelines for the mining industry. In 2013 the GMSG established the Industrial Comminution Efficiency (ICE) working group to develop freely available guidelines for plant operators to quantify the operating efficiency of industrial comminution circuits. This initiative has engaged a diverse group of representatives from mining companies, equipment vendors, consultants and metallurgical laboratories with vast experience and capabilities in the field of comminution. The GMSG has issued the first two guidelines from the ICE working group in 2015-2016, with the third guideline having completed the approvals process and being in the final stages of editing ahead of release later in 2016. The completed guidelines are publicly available from the GMSG website: http://www.globalminingstandards.org/.

Two of the ICE guidelines present methods to quantify comminution circuit efficiency, and a complementary guideline descries best practice methods to collect the necessary samples and data to furnish these assessments. Collectively the guidelines cover sampling, survey data collection, laboratory testing procedures and calculation processes to allow the user to generate a relative circuit efficiency factor for the comminution circuit at the time of survey. The reference energy consumption is calculated considering the measured F80, P80 and ore strength at the time of survey, using either or both of the Bond or Morrell methods presented in GMSG guidelines dedicated to each method. The guidelines consequently provide the end user with practical tools to perform circuit efficiency analysis and to readily quantify the impact of optimisation efforts.

This paper presents the content of the three ICE guidelines and describes their intended application.

 

CITATION:

Giblett A and Daniel M. Global mining standards and guidelines for determining comminution circuit efficiency, in Proceedings of 13th AusIMM Mill Operators’ Conference, Perth WA, 10-12 October 2016, pp 3-8 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy).

CEEC would like to thank to The AusIMM for permission to reproduce this abstract.

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