Grinding and Mineral Processing Research
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Current Projects
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Modeling of hydrocyclones large eddy simulations computational fluid dynamics approach
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Large Eddy Simulation model (LES). LES captures the characteristics of dynamics of the flow that allows the accurate prediction of the velocity profile at different location and the velocity fluctuation. The prediction of the velocity profiles creates the dynamics that leads to the formation of the air core. LES simulation is more expensive in computational time, but extra effort expended in describing the turbulence structure leads to a better prediction of the air-core and particle separation by size. For more information on this project visit Jose Angel Delgadillo Gomez's website.
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Graduate student : Jose Angle Delgadillo Gomez
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DOE pulp and shell lifter project
For more information please visit DOE shell and pulp lifter project website.
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The overall objective of the project is to develop an integrated process model to enable the SAG mills to operate with high energy efficiency.
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To study the effect of individual variables such as charge filling, shell lifter configuration and design of discharge grate and pulp lifter on power draft of the mill by isolating the effect of one on each other.
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Conduct plant surveys at Kennecott Utah Copper Corporation and Cortez Gold Mines around the plant scale SAG mills to collect the operational data to simulate in pilot mill to optimize the performance of SAG mill and increase the energy efficiency.
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Graduate students : Sravan Prathy and Trailokyanath Patra
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Graduate Seminar by Sravan Prathy (this is a 10 MB file)
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Instrumented Grinding Ball (IGB) for optimizing grinding mill performance
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Currently, semiautogenous and ball mills expend approximately 99 trillion Btu’s annual for size reduction. Comminution in grinding mills is inherently inefficient using only about 1 percent of the input energy. Grinding mills also consume tons of steel balls and liners. By monitoring grinding mill operation, grinding energy efficiency can be improved by as much as 10 percent. However, any kind of monitoring device to measure the conditions inside the mill shell during operation is virtually impossible due to the sever environment presented by the tumbling charge. An instrumented grinding ball, which is capable of surviving a few hours and transmitting the impacts it experiences, is proposed here. The spectrum of impacts collected over 100 revolutions of the mills presents the signature of the grinding environment inside mill. This signature could be effectively used to optimize the milling performance by investigating this signature’s relation to mill product size, mill throughput, make-up ball size, mill speed, liner profile and ball addition rates.
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Graduate student : Vishal Duriseti
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Eddy current separation of e-scrap
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This project concerns about separating metallic granules from a waste stream such as foundry sand and electronic scrap. E-scrap is becoming a great challenge in this country as more and more electronic devices become obsolete and end up in discard-piles. The separation method is based on eddy current generated by radio frequency current flowing through a coil surrounding a ferrite core.
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Graduate student : Swadhin Saurabh
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Isotopic dilution of nuclear material in planetary mill
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Graduate students : Vikas Devrani and Harrapan Sethi
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