eHPCC™ offers potential to:
- reduce plant footprint
- replace secondary and tertiary crushing circuits
- replace tumbling mills and pebble crushers
- eliminate the consumption of grinding media
- reduce comminution energy demand
- be tolerant of feed particle variants
- dry grinding
- preserve product particle shape
- classify particles
- produce narrow range of product particle size distribution
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removes the need to work in confined spaces
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reduces downtime
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reduces manual handling of liners
- use proven wear liner technologies
- not trap liberated dense minerals
- provide field variables for life-long optimization
- be readily transported and assembled
- receive run-of-mine ore depending on blast-fragmentation / particle size (large scale)
- enhance gravity separation of product from gangue
- facilitate in-mine pre-concentration
- provides an opportunity to prepare a suitable in-mine product for alternate material handling from the mine to mill i.e. using fluid conveyance (pneumatic or slurry); hence reducing demand on winders, skips, and or haulage trucks (and their wasteful return journey into the mine).
CONCLUSIONS
Conventional SAG and ball mill circuits are well understood. Their performance has arguably reached their limit. eHPCC™, its design philosophy, capabilities, and novel flowsheet concepts demonstrably offer improvements/benefits of new dry, inert, open-circuit flowsheet concepts that are directly applicable and comparable to conventional process flowsheets. Engineering layout and maintenance cost-benefits are apparent I.e. less equipment, open-circuit and less overall footprint. Process-benefits include reducing water, energy, and grinding-media consumption and improving chemistry. Coarser mineral liberation and reduced liner wear will demonstrably as more operating history acquired.