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Bond WI as a parameter for the evaluation of ore variability in current grinding plant design practice. Authors. Douglas M. Mazzinghy a , Vladmir K. Alves a , Claudio L. Schneider b* (a) Vale – Centro de Desenvolvimento Mineral, Brazil (b) Cetem – Centro de Tecnologia Mineral, Brazil.
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Bond WI as a parameter for the evaluation of ore variability in current grinding plant design practice
Authors • Douglas M. Mazzinghy a, Vladmir K. Alves a, Claudio L. Schneider b* • (a) Vale – Centro de Desenvolvimento Mineral, Brazil • (b) Cetem – Centro de Tecnologia Mineral, Brazil
MOTIVATION Design and scale-up of grinding plants for Green Field projects at Vale’s CDM • Copper ores • Iron ores • Apatite ores • Other projects
OBJECTIVES • To characterize the ore body for milling design • To design a grinding circuit that attends 80% of the ore body • To be able to design the milling circuit using modern simulation and scale-up techniques
The Bond WI • Single parameter that can be easily incorporated in variability analysis • Parameter is required for over 150 drill core samples • Time frame for all grinding tests and conceptual design is usually less than one year
The Bond WI • A good lab can perform 1.5 Bond tests per day totaling 100 days of continuing testing • Sample requirements is large for drill core campaigns • Use of simplified procedures may reduce time requirements significantly (and costs) as well as sample requirements
The Bond WI • The “Anaconda” procedure has been shown to produce statistics that are equal to the complete Bond test (the distributions of BWI have the same average, standard deviation, form, etc….) • Anaconda requires only about 1kg of crushed drill core sample
The Bond WI • A good lab can perform ten Anaconda tests per day
Calculation of the distribution of BWI fr a subset of drill core samples from GFPA
Calculation of BWI80 for a subset of drill core samples from GFPA
The variability of Anaconda BWI for all drill core samples from project GFPA BWI80 = 19 kWh/t
Q: While the BWI variability campaign is being run do we need to wait for its results to run H-F scale up tests? A: No. We run H-F scale-up tests in a number of samples right at the beginning of the variability campaign. For these samples we also run BWI standard tests.
The H-F scale-up procedure test results for the scale-up samples
We pick the sample with the measured BWI that is closest to the value of BWI80 from the variability campaign
And we scale-up the grinding circuit for 80% of the ore body using these parameters
Discussion • The correction is feasible because both parameters (BWI and S1E) are multiplied by mill power at scale-up so that the amount of additional power that would be required by both methods are exactly equal.
Conclusion • BWI may be used as a parameter in assessing ore body variability with advantage. • Simplified BWI techniques can be used as all that is required is the value of BWI80, not the sample that generated this BWI80
Acknowledgements • This work was sponsored by Vale.