Desarrollo de software académico para la simulación de procesos metalúrgicos de reducción y clasificación de tamaño : Desarrollo de un software académico para la simulación de un sistema de molienda.

Abstract

Ball mill is an equipment for size reduction of minerals from millimeters to microns. Grinding follows a fracture kinetics where minerals are broken by impact fracture or abrasion fracture. The general grinding model is a differential equation that expresses how a fraction of the mother particles disappear by breaking and new daughter particles are created from larger sizes. The breaking of the particles continues until the breaking energy has been completely dissipated. To know how the particles break inside the mill the selection and fracture parameters must be estimated. The objective is the development of software for the simulation of a ball mill system. An application was created in AppDesigner of the Matlab program where sections were designed for the alpha and beta constants of the selection and fracture function, the granulometric analysis, the specific energy consumption and the results. The program expresses the results by means of a graph of the accumulated past vs opening, for example, data of a copper ore was introduced, and the program determined that the curve of simulated accumulated past has a similar trend to experimental accumulated past which is reflected in an coefficient of determination of 0.989. Therefore, ball mill simulator fulfil the expected scope because it allows validating the parameters of the selection and fracture function based on the differential equation of the grinding model.