The advent of steam power greatly improved the efficiency of flour mills. In 1786, two 37-kW steam engines were connected to drive 20 stone mills (1.5 m in diameter) at the Albion grain mill in London (Fischer 1944), and for the next 100 years, grain was ground mainly in steam-driven querns. A flour mill that […]
Рубрика: The History of Grinding
Cryogenic Crushers
Impact breakage processes are used to reduce the size of hard, brittle materials but are not useful for reducing soft or elastic materials unless the materials can be cooled to the point at which they become brittle. This is where cryogenic breakage is becoming very important. Its main use is in recycling processes for plastic […]
THE CYANIDE PROCESS
The discovery of fine-grained gold ores on the Witwatersrand in South Africa in 1886 highlighted the importance of finding a new method to extract the gold, because the losses with the amalgamation process used at the time were excessive. Chemists had known for 100 years that gold could be dissolved in potassium cyanide. A patent […]
PRIMARY MILLS
Wet Mills In the early 1930s, the economic depression was in full force, and the only interest in new grinding machines was for milling gold ores, because gold was the only metal that was not falling in price. In 1933, gold rose from $21 to $35/oz. Alvah Hadsel, a mechanical engineer in California with considerable […]
RAKE CLASSIFIERS
Figure 9.2a shows the Dorr classifier as it was in 1940, and it has changed little since then. Mineral companies quickly accepted the rake classifier and thickener, and closed — circuit wet grinding became part of mineral processing technology. With its reciprocating rakes, the Dorr classifier soon had competition from the Akins classifier (Figure 9.2b), […]
Advances in Rock Drilling in the 20th Century
By 1900, rock drilling had reached the point at which hammer drills were available that operated at several hundred cycles per minute, worked at any angle of inclination, had the cutting head held at the rock face by an air cylinder, and had the chips and fine detritus continually removed from the working zone by […]