Title

EVOLUTION OF THE ISAMILL INTO MAGNETITE PROCESSING

EVOLUTION OF THE ISAMILL INTO MAGNETITE PROCESSING

Authorship

Barns, Katie; Do, Tommy; Larson, Michael; Rasmussen, Greg

Barns, Katie

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Do, Tommy

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Larson, Michael

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Rasmussen, Greg

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DOI

10.5151/2594-357X-23997

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Abstract

IsaMill technology was developed from the stirred milling technology of Netzsch Feinmahltechnik GmbH in the 1990's for use in the fine grained lead zinc ore bodies of Northern Australia in a drive to bring about a step change in grinding efficiency required to make these ore bodies economic to process. The following two decades have seen the technology evolve from its development in relatively small tonnage, ultrafine grinding duties to a technology that is equally at home in large throughput, standard coarse regrind and mainstream grinding duties. With this evolution has come the realisation that more energy efficient circuits are achievable by using technology that is tailored to the grinding duty. The expansion of magnetite projects in Australia has embraced the opportunity to take advantage of newer technologies that were not necessarily available when the magnetite industries of North America and Europe were maturing. Among these has been IsaMill technology which has allowed the Australian Magnetite industry to take advantage of improved energy efficiency coupled with tight product size distributions that originally made the IsaMill so attractive to the base metals processing industry. This paper investigates the effect of the IsaMill grinding technology on the full scale Australian Magnetite operations at Ernest Henry Mining along with pilot and lab scale demonstrations of optimization.

IsaMill technology was developed from the stirred milling technology of Netzsch Feinmahltechnik GmbH in the 1990's for use in the fine grained lead zinc ore bodies of Northern Australia in a drive to bring about a step change in grinding efficiency required to make these ore bodies economic to process. The following two decades have seen the technology evolve from its development in relatively small tonnage, ultrafine grinding duties to a technology that is equally at home in large throughput, standard coarse regrind and mainstream grinding duties. With this evolution has come the realisation that more energy efficient circuits are achievable by using technology that is tailored to the grinding duty. The expansion of magnetite projects in Australia has embraced the opportunity to take advantage of newer technologies that were not necessarily available when the magnetite industries of North America and Europe were maturing. Among these has been IsaMill technology which has allowed the Australian Magnetite industry to take advantage of improved energy efficiency coupled with tight product size distributions that originally made the IsaMill so attractive to the base metals processing industry. This paper investigates the effect of the IsaMill grinding technology on the full scale Australian Magnetite operations at Ernest Henry Mining along with pilot and lab scale demonstrations of optimization.

Keywords

IsaMill; Comminution; Grinding; Energy efficiency; Beneficiation; Concentration.

IsaMill; Comminution; Grinding; Energy efficiency; Beneficiation; Concentration.