The application of high pressure grinding rolls (HPGR) has been growing in the mining industry for the last 10 to 15 years. The major benefits supporting this trend are better energy efficiency, improved grinding capacity, and higher metal recovery in downstream processes such as heap leaching and flotation. In general there is limited quantitative knowledge on the true benefits of HPGRs relative to SAG mills in comminution, and about which situations one deals with better than the other. This paper will present a structure for comparison of the energy requirements for HPGR versus SAG mill considering complete circuits for comminution of precious and base metals hard ores. The work presented is from the design of four complete circuits based on ore data from two sites.
This paper is provided with the approval and support of SAIMM, the publisher and copyright holder of the paper.
© The Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, 2010. SA ISSN 0038–223X/3.00 +0.00. These papers were selected from the Comminution ’08 Conference, held in the UK on 17–20 June 2008.