What is the difference between a cone ball mill and an ordinary ball mill?

In the field of mining grinding, although the conical ball mill and the ordinary ball mill are both crushing equipment, there are significant differences in structural design, operating efficiency and applicable scenarios, which directly affect production benefits.

1. Structural design differences

Ordinary ball mills use an ‌equal-diameter cylindrical barrel‌, with only a single grinding bin inside, and the material is crushed by free sliding through the rotation of the barrel. The conical ball mill innovatively adopts a ‌conical barrel structure‌, with the front end diameter reduced by 30%-50% compared to the rear end, and with the internal stepped liner, a multi-stage crushing chamber is formed to achieve gradient processing of materials from coarse crushing to fine grinding.

2. Upgraded working principle

Ordinary ball mills rely on the impact crushing of steel balls, and the grinding medium collides with the material randomly, resulting in a large energy loss (about 18%-25%). The conical ball mill uses the centrifugal force difference of the conical cylinder to automatically grade the grinding media: large-diameter steel balls are concentrated at the feed end to crush large particles, and small steel balls are gathered at the discharge end to complete fine grinding, which increases the grinding efficiency by more than 40% and reduces the unit power consumption by 15%-20%.

3. Performance parameter comparison

Taking the processing of spodumene as an example (feed particle size ≤25mm):

Ordinary ball mills take 2.5 hours to reach a fineness of 0.074mm (200 mesh) and a production capacity of 55t/h;

Conical ball mills only take 1.8 hours to achieve the same fineness, and the production capacity is increased to 80t/h, and the over-crushing rate is reduced from 12% to less than 7%.

The conical model is equipped with a hydraulic jacking device, which shortens the maintenance time by 60%, and is particularly suitable for continuous production of high-hardness ores.

4. Application scenario differentiation

Ordinary ball mills are suitable for small and medium-sized iron ore, copper ore and other scenarios with loose particle size requirements; cone ball mills are more suitable for lithium ore, quartz sand and other refined processing that requires strict control of particle size distribution, as well as water-scarce areas (the cone structure has its own discharge slope to reduce water consumption).

When choosing, it is necessary to comprehensively consider the ore characteristics, production capacity requirements and energy consumption standards: although the initial investment of cone ball mills is 15%-20% higher, the long-term operating cost advantage is significant, especially suitable for enterprises pursuing high value-added mineral processing.