Ores are generally very heterogeneous in their physical properties. Variation of the ore from a mine can cause the mill feed to vary in grindability. In the comminution of heterogeneous materials, an understanding of how different constituents behave by themselves and how they interact with each other may prove useful not only for understanding grinding mill action but also for obtaining the optimum values which used in mathematical modelling.
Locked cycle tests show that in the grinding of mixtures relatively long time is required to attain steady state, during which the composition of the mill contents continuously change. Therefore, the main objective of this work is to study the behavior of the components of limestone-quartz binary mixture at different ratios of mixing from the start point to attain the steady state condition using the experimental fixed-time locked-cycle tests.
It is shown that attaining the steady state condition in a fixed time locked cycle is faster with low circulating load for soft material than those for hard one when they ground separately. As admixture, the hard component appearance increases gradually with decreasing the fineness of the product as its percentage increases in the feed.