Challenges in grinding of fine-grained, complex ores

Automated liberation analysis can be used for the analysis of grinding of skarn ores. For the case study a complex, fine grained cassiterite bearing skarn ore serves as feed material for grinding tests in a stirred media mill. The visualization of grinding is applied via binning of particle images from Mineral Liberation Analyzer (MLA) into characteristic property classes. Various grinding effects and challenges in interpretation are discussed for the progress of grinding with the presented visualization method.