
With a view to developing a sound basis for the design and scale-up of ball mills, a large amount of data available in the literature were analyzed for variation of the two key mill performance parameters power specific values of the absolute breakage rate of the coarsest size fraction, S *, and absolute rate of production of fines, F *, with some of the important operating and ... parameter to isolate ball mill grinding efficiency handicapped efforts to study the effect of any ball mill design or operating variable. Along with plant testing difficulties, only fairly large changes in circuit performance could be linked to a media size change. Population balance modelling was deemed unsuitable for this purpose.