Experimental and numerical investigation of liner profile impacts on comminution performance of SAG mill in Sarcheshmeh Copper Complex

Today, in the most of mining projects, especially in high volume mining using SAG and AG due to the special features respect to the other conventional methods has been developed. Usually in comminution process a small percentage of energy consumed by grinding and crushing processes. Also, the comminution process depended on many parameters such as: ore hardness, charge volume, size and geometry of ore, charge and size of ball, percentage of critical velocity of mill and liner profile. Therefore, achieving to optimum mentioned factors and consumed energy is of particular importance. Since it is impossible to consider interaction of all effective parameters simultaneously by experimental methods and are expensive and time consuming, in this research the effect of liner profile on comminution process has been investigated by changing the height and angle of liners using numerical method. In recent work the results of scaled experimental mill has been used for validation of numerical method. The results show a liner with a height of 140 mm and an angle of 15 degrees has the maximum impact and comminution. The results from FEM model of the SAG mill at Sarcheshmeh Copper Complex, are in good agreement with the measured data from experimental SAG mill.