Grinding refers to the term crushing or breaking solid objects into small pieces or particles. The machine people or companies use for this kind of work is called a grinding mill or grinding machine. Many manufacturer companies uses grinding mill to get the desired form of raw materials to produce a specific product. Different sizes of grinding mills are available in the market depending on the materials it grinds to meet the demand of the buyer. Grinding mills basically use mechanical force to break down big solid objects into required shapes such as powder, shattered pieces or a stack of mass. Different companies also use grinding mills to extract certain materials from a mixture of several matters. For these purposes, grinding mills require a large amount of energy to operate.
Manufacturers designed different types of grinding mills for different purposes. One can found a hand held grinding mill to a industrial standard size grinding mill in the market. Some of these grinding mills have the capacity to process tons of materials in a single day. Different types of grinding mills are discussed bellow along with their purposes.
- Ball grinding mill: ball mills are the most common ones. They have horizontal cylinders filled with metal balls. The cylinder rolls around creating a friction and impact with the balls. The impact then crushes and mixes up the materials inside. This type of grinding mill is basically used for mixing cement and processing minerals.
- Rod grinding mill: a rod mill is also called slitting mill. It has rod of different diameter and sizes inside a drum. The rotation of the drum causes friction and impact of the materials with the rods. The impact creates fine shape of particles.
- Pebble grinding mill: in pebble mill, the drums roll faster creating more friction. This results in the impact of particles and the pebble rocks inside the drum.
- Tower grinding mill: These are also called as vertical mills in some places. Tower mills are used for grinding matters of smaller sizes. People sometimes use it on materials which are already processed in ball mill for more fine materials.
- Autogenous grinding mill: in this grinding mill, rotating drums throws in large balls of matter in a rapid motion. This causes the ball to break and make smaller particles.
- SAG mill: SAG is the short form of semi autogenous grinding. The difference between autogenous and SAG mills is, it uses balls to grind like ball grinding mill. SAG mills have built-in lifting plates inside the drum. When the drum rotates, the lifting plates lift the materials and the balls to the top and release them back to the surface. It causes the materials to mix at a primary level.
There are several more grinding mills such as bench grinding mill, belt grinding mill, jig grinding mill and so on. They all have their respective purposes. If you are thinking of buying a grinding mill, you can choose any of the above.
