Numerical analysis of impact events in a centrifugal impact pin mill

C. Labra, J. Y. Ooi, J. F. Chen, and J. Sun

Citation: AIP Conference Proceedings 1542, 935 (2013); doi: 10.1063/1.4812086

View online: https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4812086
View Table of Contents: http://aip.scitation.org/toc/apc/1542/1
Published by the American Institute of Physics
 Numerical Analysis of Impact Events in a Centrifugal
Impact Pin Mill
C. Labra∗ , J. Y. Ooi∗ , J.F. Chen∗,† and J. Sun∗
∗
Institute for Infrastructure & Environment, School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh, UK
†
School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Queen’s University Belfast, North Ireland, UK

Abstract. Milling is an important operation in many industries, such as mining and pharmaceutical. Although the comminu-
tion process during milling has been extensively studied, the material fragmentation mechanisms in a mill are still not well
understood partly because of the lack of an understanding on the local stressing and dynamic information under operational
conditions in mills.
This paper presents a DEM simulation of particle dynamics and impact events in a centrifugal impact pin mill. The main
focus is the statistical characteristics of the dominant stressing modes during the milling process. The frequency, velocity and
force of the different impact events between particles and mill components, or between particles, are analysed.
Keywords: Milling, Discrete elements, Comminution
PACS: 81.20.Wk, 07.05.Tp, 79.20.Ap, 81.05.Rm

INTRODUCTION MODELLING OF IMPACT PIN MILL

Milling is a common unit operation deployed in many
industrial sectors for particle size reduction. Although
its importance has been recognised for many years,
it is still known to be highly inefficient in terms of
energy consumption, and its optimization in design
and operation remains very challenging largely due to
the lack of scientific understanding of the complex
mechanisms involved.
Considerable amount of work has been conducted to
date on measuring and characterising the grinding char-
acteristics of particulate solids. Examples include sin-
gle particle measurements on impact, crushing charac-
teristics [1, 2] and bulk measurements on attrition, shear
and compression [3, 4]. Whilst these measurements have
provided useful scientific insights relating the milling
characteristics to the mechanical properties and particle
breakage mechanisms as a result of the loading condi-
tions induced in these tests, it is not at all clear how
these loading conditions relate to what actually happens
in a typical milling operation. Since particle breakage is
highly sensitive to both the nature of the stressing mod-
e and the strain rate imposed on the particles in a mil-
l, the relevance of these tests is not clear. This paper
describes a numerical study using the discrete element
method (DEM) to evaluate the stressing events that pre-
vail in an impact pin milling operation which can then be
used to establish material grindability in the context of
these stressing events.
Impact mills are one of the most popular types of mill-
s for fine and intermediate grinding [5, 6]. Their differ-
ent mechanical designs give different grinding perfor-
mances. Typical impact mills include high-speed rotat-
ing disk, hammer, axial flow and annular. Rotating disk
mills have pins or blades on each disk, with one of the
disks rotates at high speeds up to about 150 m/s.
A high-speed rotating disk pin mill generates consid-
erable impact between the solids and pins. They are com-
monly used for fine grinding applications.
This paper presents a study in which an impact pin
mill was modelled using the DEM. The simulations were
performed assuming vacuum condition and rigid parti-
cles. More complex models including particle breakage
and/or fluid coupling will be considered in the future.
The discrete element method
The DEM method is widely recognized as a suitable
tool for modelling materials such as rocks, soils, and
mineral ores [7]. The DEM assumes that the granular ma-
terial can be represented as a collection of rigid particles
interacting with each other in the normal and tangential
directions at the contact points. Material deformation is
assumed to be concentrated at the contact points. Dif-
ferent contact models have been proposed to represent
different contact behaviour [8, 9, 10]. In this study, a for-
mulation for spherical elements following the original as-
sumptions presented by Cundall and Strack [11] is used,
considering a linear elastic contact model with a constant

Powders and Grains 2013

AIP Conf. Proc. 1542, 935-938 (2013); doi: 10.1063/1.4812086
© 2013 AIP Publishing LLC 978-0-7354-1166-1/$30.00

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stiffness [12]. A Velocity Verlet algorithm is used for the
time integration scheme [13, 14].

Impact pin mill model

The centrifugal impact mill modelled in this study is
a pin mill from Hosokawa Micron Ltd. The mill is 200
mm in diameter and consists of five rings of pins. The
pins are 3 mm in diameter and 15 mm in length. In the
actual mill the pin spacing reduces outwards considering
the reduction of particle size. As the DEM model in
this study considers rigid particles without breakage, the
pin spacing is kept constant at about 7 mm (∼3 particle
diameters) in all rings. Three rings of pins are fixed to the
rotary bottom plate which rotates at a speed of 1000 rpm,
while the other two rings of pins are fixed to the static top
plate, where the particle inlet is located. The numerical
model is shown in Figure 1.
The model consists of 6400 spherical particles, which
have a diameter varying between 1.16 and 1.20 mm
following a normal distribution. The particle density is
ρ = 1000 kg/m3 . All the contacts are assumed to have a
normal contact stiffness kn = 106 N/m, tangential contact
stiffness ks = 0.1 kn , and Coulomb friction coefficient
μ = 0.5.
At the start of the simulation, the particles are intro-
duced in the mill through the central inlet at an initial
velocity of 10 m/s. Once inside the mill, they are accel-
erated by the centrifugal forces and launched towards the
impact zone consisting of alternate rotating and static pin
rings. The particles that have passed through the impact
zone are re-introduced to the inlet with the same initial
conditions so all conditions remain constant at the steady
state which was reached after 0.2 seconds from the s-
tart. This paper reports selected results for a simulation
conducted for 1.2 seconds of mill operation time. The
mass rate at the steady state was found to be 80 kg per
hour. A sample of the simulation performed is depicted
in Figure 1.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
During the 1.2s of the simulated milling process, a sam-
ple size of 1342 particles and all the pins has been tracked
to record the impact events. The impact events for parti-
cles and pins are analysed separately, allowing the study
of their behaviour individually.
During the simulation, a total of 75748 impacts were
recorded for all the tracked particles. Table 1 shows the
statistics of these impacts, of which 88% are particle-pin
impacts, 5% particle-particle impact and the remaining
7% are impacts with the mill discs. This shows as ex-
FIGURE 1. DEM model of an impact pin mill after 1 s
operation time
pected that the particle-pin impact is the dominant event.
TABLE 1. Statistics of particle impact events
Parameter Values
No. of particles 1342
Max. No. of impacts per particle 269
Min. No. of impacts per particle 4
Mean No. of impacts per particle 56
Mean No. of particle-pin impacts 50
Mean No. of particle-particle impacts 3
Mean normal impact force (N) 19.50
stdev normal impact force (N) 15.97
Mean relative impact velocity (m/s) 4.73
stdev relative impact velocity (m/s) 3.93
Mean pass time (s) 0.088
stdev pass time (s) 0.051
To allow for a better comparison of the impact events
in the analysis, the time for each particle was initialised at
t = 0 at the first particle-pin impact event. The pass time
shown in Table 1 and plotted hereafter thus represents the
time required for the particles to pass through the impact
zone.
Figure 2 shows that the average impact normal force
increases initially and becomes almost constant very
shortly after that, except a few impacts with higher
impact forces for a few when the particles have been
resident in the impact zone for an extended period of time
(0.4 - 0.5 s). The impact frequency reduces exponentially
in the impact zone over time (Figure 3), showing that the
great majority of impacts occur in a range of 0.2 s.
The number of impacts per particle also reduces
exponentially as the impact velocity (and thus the impact
force) increases (Figure 4). As particle breakage does not

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FIGURE 2. Evolution of average impact normal force when
particles pass through the impact zone
FIGURE 3. Particle impact frequency vs particle pass time
through the impact zone
usually occur under low impact force/velocity, and mod-
ification to the mill design to alter this distribution to re-
duce the number of low velocity impact would be bene-
ficial.
FIGURE 4. Frequency vs magnitude of the impact velocity
of the particles
For the impact events recorded in the different rings
937
of pins, the main statistical parameters are presented in
Table 2.
It is seen that the number of impacts reduces almost
linearly from the inner Ring 1 to the outer Ring 5, except
for the innermost ring which registered a smaller number
of impacts than the next Ring 2, probably because the
particle velocity is still relatively low before the first
impact with a pin in the first ring.
The distribution of the particle-pin impact force and
velocity over the pins is almost uniform. The frequency
of the impact normal force and velocity for each ring of
pins are shown in Figures 5 and 6.
FIGURE 5. Distribution of normal impact normal force in
each ring of pins
FIGURE 6. Distribution of relative impact velocity in each
ring of pins
For the impact normal force, the results show that a
significant proportion of the impacts have almost negli-
gible values which will not lead to any significant par-
ticle breakage. This is particularly true for the first (in-
nermost) ring of pins. The distribution becomes progres-
sively flatter for the outer rings (Figure 5). The same phe-
nomenon applies to the impact velocity (Figure 6).
Other interesting results are found comparing the
number and distribution of the impacts between the dif-
ferent pin rings. The first and second inner pin rings have
similar number and distribution of impacts, but after the
 TABLE 2. Statistics of impact events in different rings of pins
Parameter Ring 1 Ring 2 Ring 3 Ring 4 Ring 5
No. of pins 60 66 72 76 80
Max. No. of impacts per pin 6101 6915 4858 3229 1315
Min. No. of impacts per pin 5289 6010 4273 2817 1119
Mean No. of impacts per pin 5639 6386 4564 3026 1212
stdev No. of impacts per pin 149.1 178.1 116.1 91.4 45.2
Mean normal impact force (N) 14.95 19.63 23.43 27.00 28.52
stdev normal impact force (N) 12.88 14.05 16.27 17.64 18.15
Mean relative impact velocity (m/s) 3.51 4.62 5.51 6.35 6.69
stdev relative impact velocity (m/s) 3.15 3.47 4.02 4.37 4.53

second layer the number of impacts reduces significant-
ly, indicating that the outer rings of pins may not be as
effective in reducing the particle size as the inner rings.
The results presented here are all in the normal impact
direction. Further investigation is being undertaken to
investigate the characteristics in the tangential direction,
the resultant impact velocity and force as well as other
quantities which can shed more lights into the particle
dynamics and impact characteristics in the mill.
CONCLUSIONS
This paper has presented a DEM analysis of a centrifugal
impact pin mill. The impact events have been analysed
with a focus on the characteristics of the impact event,
force and velocity which can be used to characterise
the mill function. This is a preliminary study aiming
to develop an understanding of the particle dynamics in
the milling process. It has been shown that the particles
are under the effect of multiple impacts with different
objects during the process and the pins on the outer
rings are not as effective as those in the inner rings for
the mill configuration studied. The significance of these
findings will be further investigated considering particle
breakage in the simulation, leading to a deeper scientific
understanding of the grindability of granular solids.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the
European Community under the Marie Curie Initial
Training Network, the support of the International Fine
Particles Research Institute and useful discussion from
Hosokawa Micron Ltd.

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