Minerals Engineering xxx (2014) xxxxxx

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Minerals Engineering
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/mineng

Performance characterisation of AG/SAG mill pulp lifters using CFD

techniques
N.S. Weerasekara , M.S. Powell
University of Queensland, JKMRC, 40 Isles Road, Indooroopilly, QLD 4068, Australia

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Available online xxxx
Keywords:
CFD
Grinding mills
Pulp lifter
Discharge

a b s t r a c t
The pulp lifter is an integral component of autogenous (AG) and semi-autogenous (SAG) grinding mills as
it controls the throughput, performance and efciency of mills. The slurry transport from the AG/SAG mill
through grate holes into the discharge trunnion is the main function of the pulp lifter. This process develops complex ow behaviour in the region of the grate and pulp lifter. Efcient and effective removal of
pulp/slurry from the mill is the key objective of the pulp lifter design.
This work aims to understand slurry ow behaviour in pulp lifter sections and its contribution to mill
performance using computational uid dynamics (CFD) modelling and Laser Doppler Anemometry (LDA)
measurements applied to a laboratory scale mill. The CFD model is validated against the LDA measurements, and then used to build a cohesive computational framework for modelling industrial pulp lifters,
to investigate unique problems associated with their design and performance.
2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
AG and SAG mills of 1223 MW power draw are at the forefront
of size reduction for mineral extraction in most of the mining operations around the world. The pulp discharge mechanism, consisting of a grate and pulp lifter arrangement, is an integral
component of these mills. The grate retains over-size particles in
the mill charge. The pulp lifters transport the slurry, which has
passed through grate holes, into the discharge trunnion. The slurry
discharge function plays an important role in the overall performance of the mill. The removal process has been the subject of
considerable controversy in recent years as inadequate slurry removal capacity can constrain mill throughput (Cleary et al.,
2006; Powell and Valery, 2006; Royston, 2000; Warder and Davies,
1994). If the mill cannot effectively remove the slurry it forms an
internal slurry pool, which reduces the milling efciency and
capacity to produce ne particles by up to 20% (Latchireddi and
Morrell, 2006). This in turn reduces the recovery of the valuable
minerals. Both the throughput and recovery issues inuence mine
protability (and viability in some instances) and have a negative
effect on the energy efciency and environmental impact of the
operation.
Some previous work has been carried out in computational
modelling of pulp lifter sections using Discrete Element Method
Corresponding author. Tel.: +61 733655966.
E-mail address: n.weerasekara@uq.edu.au (N.S. Weerasekara).

(DEM) (Alkac, 2011; Rajamani et al., 2011; Rajamani, 2007) and

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) (Cleary et al., 2006).
These modelling exercises concentrated on the ow though the
grate only, rather than on the ow in the pulp lifter chamber. They
also lack the all-important inuence of the porosity or hold-up of
the mill contents, and the build-up of slurry in the discharge chamber providing a back-ow into the milling chamber. In addition,
limited work has being presented in terms of using CFD and coupled CFDDEM to give a more realistic simulation of the interaction of the uids and solids in the slurry.
The aim of this work is to understand slurry ow behaviour in
pulp discharge sections (Fig. 1) and its interface to the mill using
the CFD technique compared with laboratory experiments. CFD
studies of multiphase ow in a lab scale 300 mm diameter mill
with a discharge pulp lifter and a water medium were used. The
studies used FLUENT with a 3D body tted grid and used the Volume of Fluid (VOF) model to model the two phases, with an openchannel ow model for modelling the ow in the mill section and
standard ke turbulence model for turbulence. The model is
validated by a laboratory test-work program conducted using a
specially designed pulp chamber test rig.

2. CFD model description

Flows in mills are multiphase, consisting of various sizes of ore
particles in a slurry media. This mixture tumbles inside a mill shell
where atmospheric air is present. At a minimum this is a 3-phase

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Please cite this article in press as: Weerasekara, N.S., Powell, M.S. Performance characterisation of AG/SAG mill pulp lifters using CFD techniques. Miner.
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behaviour becomes important. Flow is generally governed by the

forces of gravity and inertia.
The dynamic mesh model (ANSYS, 2011) is used to model ows
where the shape of the domain is changing with time due to motion on the domain boundaries. The motion can be a prescribed
motion, which in this case is the angular velocity about the central
axis of the mill with time. The update of the volume mesh is handled automatically at each time step based on the new positions of
the boundaries. To use the dynamic mesh model, the starting volume mesh and the description of the motion of any moving zones
in the model are specied. Since the model contains moving and
non-moving regions, they are identied by grouping them into
their respective face or cell zones in the starting volume mesh. A
sliding interface capability is used to connect the various zones
in the nal model. The sliding mesh model is a special case of
the general dynamic mesh motion wherein the nodes move rigidly
in a given dynamic mesh zone. Additionally, multiple cell zones are
connected with each other through non-conformal interfaces. As
the mesh motion is updated in time, the non-conformal interfaces
are likewise updated to reect the new positions of each zone.

Fig. 1. Graphical representation of the slurry transport in an AG/SAG mill.

ow problem. Multiphase ows can be solved by a number of CFD

techniques. These include the full Eulerian multiphase approach,
simplied Eulerian approaches such as the mixture and VOF models and the Lagrangian approach.
The VOF model (Hirt and Nichols, 1981) and the mixture model
(Manninen et al., 1996) are simplied Eulerian multiphase approaches where the equations of motion are solved for the mixture,
with additional transport equations for the volume fractions of
additional phases. The VOF model and the mixture model solve signicantly less transport equations than the full Eulerian approach
and thus are numerically more efcient. The VOF model is intended for modelling ows where there are two or more continuous phases separated by a phase boundary. A procedure to sharpen
the interface between the liquid and the air is applied. There is no
slip between the phases. The VOF and mixture models are implemented in commercial CFD codes such as ANSYS FLUENT with
the option of being used for turbulent ows with the turbulence
model enabled for the mixture.
The effects of open channel ow are modelled in the mill section of the rig using the VOF formulation and the open channel
boundary condition. These ows involve the existence of a free surface between the owing uid and uid above it (which is the
atmosphere). In such cases, the wave propagation and free surface

2.1. Geometry and meshing

As shown in Fig. 2 mesh, the pulp-lifter and the rotating section
are dened as one geometric meshed region. The 31 grate holes
were carefully meshed to connect the mill section and the pulplifter section to produce one meshed region thought. This entire
section is then dened as a rotating section, which is attached to
a stationary section using a sliding mesh arrangement. The geometry was meshed by means of the multi-block strategy such that
the mesh was contiguous across block interfaces and each block
could be mapped to a cuboidal and tetrahedral mesh by means
of curvilinear transformations. The geometry was constructed from
butter O-type mesh for the cylindrical sections, the mill body and
cylindrical open connecting holes to the lifter. The mesh structure
of the mill including the lifter and the inlet is separated by an interface section to form a narrow cylindrical section to include the
inlet to the main body, shown in Fig. 2. The size of the narrow
section was selected in such a way that it would not disturb the
overall motion of the ow and yet was relatively easy to generate
a mesh. The tetrahedral mesh was then converted into a polyhedral
mesh. This method has minimised the overall cell skewness as this
has a signicant effect upon numerical stability and accuracy.

Stationary section
Outlet

Inlet
air

Inlet
water

(a)

Rotating
section

(b)

Fig. 2. Illustration of the computational mesh of (a) the 300 mm diameter mill and (b) the pulp lifter.

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Table 1
Mill-lifter rotational speeds.
Speed (rpm)
Critical speed (%)

12.2
15.8

24.4
31.6

Flow-back

30.5
39.5

36.6
47.3

42.7
55.2

48.8
63.1

54.8
71.0

57.3
74.2

60.9
78.9

65.0
84.1

67.0
86.8

73.1
94.7

discharge

Carry-over

Fig. 3. Lab scale pulp lifter (Table 2). The right image is an exploded view.

2.2. Boundary and initial conditions

Water and air were dened as incompressible uids with density values corresponding to 1000 and 1.25 kg/m3 respectively,
and are introduced through the stationary section of the mill.
Two inlets were dened in the stationary section, with one on
the top for atmospheric air and one on the bottom for water. Since
the inlets are dened in the stationary section of the mesh, it eliminates the need for inlet surfaces that change with time. The air inlet was a pressure inlet with atmospheric conditions. The water
inlet was dened as a pressure inlet with open channel ow. This
allowed a steady stream of ow into the drum with a free surface
at a rate of 2200 ml/min through the water inlet, as in the case of
the experimental setup. The outlet located on the lifter section was
dened as a pressure outlet with atmospheric conditions. As labelled in Fig. 3, three outlets were used for measuring the ows
in the physical system, but in the CFD mesh not all the outputs
are not needed as backow and carry over can be calculated at
the corresponding locations inside the mesh. So only the inlets
and the discharge outlets need to be dened, which are shown in
Fig. 2. This system was simulated for known rotational speed
(47 rpm) until ow had achieved a numerical and experimental
stability. Using this stable solution, a series of CFD simulations
were completed for rotational speeds corresponding to the experiments (Table 1) while keeping the water ow at 2.2 L/min.
3. Experimental setup
A brief description of the laboratory-scale pulp lifter used in the
experiments and the experimental setup used to capture ow data
using LDA (Laser Doppler Anemometry) are presented in this section.
3.1. The laboratory-scale pulp lifter
The experimental rig (Fig. 3) consists of the end section of a mill
drum with a single pulp lifter made of Perspex attached to it. This
is a simplied form of the real pulp lifter arrangement, designed to

separate out the three distinct regions of slurry ow within and out
of the pulp lifter chamber. The mill is attached to a variable speed
AC motor, which is used to achieve the rotational speed in Table 1.
For the different operating experimental conditions (Table 1), ow
out of the three ports were collected using the containers as shown in
Fig. 3 (Table 2), to measure discharge, ow back and carry over.

3.2. LDA apparatus and techniques

The Laser Doppler Anemometer (Durst et al., 1976; Foreman
et al., 1965), or LDA, is a widely accepted tool for uid dynamic
investigations in gases and liquids (Morud and Hjertager, 1996;
Ng et al., 1998) and has been used as such for more than three decades. It is a well-established technique that gives information
about ow velocity. The LDA employed is a commercial Dantec
Ltd. system and comprises three different probes, one twodimensional (2-D) and two one-dimensional (1-D) probes that
can measure at the same time four velocity components in the
same or in different locations of the ow under study. The probes
are designed to work in back-scatter mode: the devices transmit
and receive laser beams and the scattered light respectively are
integrated in a single unit. A sketch of a single Dantec probe
working in back-scatter mode is shown in Fig. 4.
This so-called backscatter LDA allows for the integration of
transmitting and receiving optics in a common housing, saving
the user tedious and time-consuming work aligning separate units.
The beam from the laser is split into two beams of identical intensity under the laser diffraction crystal. In one of the beams, an
acousto-optical component known as a Bragg cell is inserted. This
introduces a xed frequency shift in that particular beam, which is
used to determine the sign of the measured velocity. The front lens
deects the two beams so they intersect, and in the intersecting
volume, seed particles scatter the incoming laser light. Part of this
light is scattered backwards toward the front lens (back scatter),
and registered in the receiver (normally a photomultiplier). Seed
particles passing the laser beams outside of the measuring volume
will of course also reect light, but the receiving optics are focused

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Fig. 4. Lab scale pulp lifter with the LDA and the laser pointing into the ow. The right image shows LDA principle (Dantec, 2013).

Fig. 5. LDA measured average velocity eld in water phase (the mill rotates in clockwise direction).

on the measuring volume, so this will be out of focus, and thus only
increase the background noise slightly (Dantec, 2006). The photomultiplier amplies the signal which is processed by a Burst Spectrum Analyser (BSA) to determine the dominant frequency in the
spectrum of the burst corresponding to the velocity of the particle
that crossed the measuring volume. The primary result of a laser
anemometer measurement is a current pulse from the photodetector. This current contains the frequency information relating to the
measured velocity. The optimum probe conguration was determined for the rig employed based on the optical accessibility of
the charge region in the rig through the transparent measuring
section (Fig. 4).

4. Results and discussion

4.1. Comparison of CFD and LDA ow elds
Using the method described above, a series of LDA measurements
were performed in the bulk water region of the mill, when the mill
was running at 47 rpm while maintaining an inlet ow rate of
2200 ml/min. LDA measured velocities presented in the comparison
are phase-averaged measurements. The mean velocities from the
CFD simulation were averaged over one revolution of the simulation.
The ow eld predicted by the CFD simulation is compared with
experimental LDA results in Figs. 5 and 6. Overall features of the ow

Fig. 6. CFD simulated ow eld (a) regions of water and air phases and (b) velocity vectors in water phase (the mill rotates in clockwise direction).

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Fig. 7. CFD predicted water owing into the pulp-lifter through grates at 47 rpm.

eld on the plane plotted by the LDA data are qualitatively reproduced by the CFD simulation. A strong rotational velocity eld prevails in the bulk charge region in the LDA data (Fig. 5) and the CFD
simulations (Fig. 6b) with comparable magnitudes. The ow in the
smeared lift up region was not compared, as it was experimentally
difcult to measure using the LDA. The CFD simulation reasonably
predicted the charge shape (Fig. 6a). The main purpose of this qualitative comparison was to establish that the CFD simulates reasonable ow patterns comparable to those experimentally observed
by the LDA, and that the numerical techniques adapted in this work
resolve the complex ow patterns observed. For a more quantitative
comparison, move detailed LDA measurements would be needed.

4.2. Comparison of CFD ow eld against bulk ow measurements

In order to calculate the inuence of the slurry ow behaviour
in the pulp lifter sections under different operating speeds, CFD

simulations were performed for the different operating experimental conditions (Table 1).
The CFD simulated the mass of water inside the pulp-lifter
(Fig. 7) for a given number of revolutions, and an average was calculated for each mill speed (Fig. 8). In an average mill revolution of
the pulp-lifter, the water mass inside the pulp-lifter initially starts
increasing, and when it reaches the top position (180), the captured water mass starts to decrease. At slow speeds (or low critical
speeds Fig. 8), the amount of water mass inside the pulp-lifter
peaks at higher values, and as the speed increases it reduces. At
slower mill rotation speeds the water mass inside the pulp-lifter
empties, but at higher speeds it does not fully empty. This indicates
that with a higher speed, speeds closer to 100% critical speed, centrifuging starts to occur, resulting in water carry-over. The amount
of water carried over increases with mill rotation speed (see
Table 1).
Similarly, ow rate out of the pulp-lifter was calculated as an
average discharge ow rate for a single revolution, using several
revolutions of CFD simulated data. The average discharge ow
rates were plotted against the pulp-lifter rotation angle (Fig. 9).
It is noted that at lower speeds, discharge starts around 90 and
at higher speeds around 150180. This indicates that, as the speed
increases, there is a delayed discharge. It is also shown that the rate
of discharge peaks across a broad speed range of 5080% of critical.

Table 2
The lab-scale pulp lifter employed in LDA experiments.
Description
Internal diameter, mm
Internal length, mm
Pulp lifter depth, mm
Pulp lifter wedge angle, deg
Pulp lifter radial length, mm
Numbers pulp lifters
Grate hole size, mm
Number of grate holes
Speed, rpm
Speed, % critical
Mill lling, %

300
100
20
30
120
1
3
31
1073
15.894.7
40

Fig. 8. CFD predicted mass of water inside the pulp-lifter.

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Thus, optimal ow discharge rates are achieved by adjusting the

mill rotational speeds.
The ow through the grate into and out of the pulp-lifter was
also calculated, for all the CFD simulated speeds (Fig. 10). The ow
into the pulp-lifter through the grate holes is considered to be positive and the ow out of the pulp-lifter though the grate holes is
considered to be negative. With an increase in rotational speed,
the ow rate into the pulp-lifter chamber reduces, with less ow
out of the pulp-lifter through the grates (ow back). This also
shows higher amounts of ow back at lower rotation rates, and
with higher speeds the ow back is delayed and at a lower rate.
The CFD data in Figs. 810 are summarised to provide per minute values and normalised by inlet ow rate to plot the discharge,
carry over and ow-back as a function of mill rotational speed
(shown by lines in Fig. 11). The CFD simulated discharge, carry over
and ow-back are compared with experimental measurements
(Fig. 11). The CFD simulated carry-over and ow-back have similar
trends as to be expected, but the experimental measurements are
lower than simulated. The low measured values could be attributed to mass loss at carry-over and ow-back measuring ports during the measurement process. CFD clearly predicts the trends as

Fig. 11. CFD and experimental discharge, carry over and ow-back.

observed experimentally, showing that when the speed increases

the ow back starts reducing and the carry over starts increasing
(Fig. 11). The CFD simulated discharge has a similar trend to the
experimental discharge with a peak around 60% critical speed.

Fig. 9. CFD predicted discharge ow rate.

Fig. 10. CFD predicted ow in (positive) and out (negative) of pulp-lifter though the grate holes.

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5. Conclusions

References

The CFD approach has been applied to waterair two-phase

ows in a laboratory scale pulp-lifter mill arrangement. This is
compared against experimental LDA ow data and bulk ow measurements. The CFD simulation reasonably predicts the charge ow
velocity and shape measured by LDA, showing strong rotational
ow elds. This establishes that the CFD modelling technique is
adequate to resolve the complex ow in the pulp-lifter mill
arrangement. The CFD predicts, at lower mill speeds that discharge
starts at rotational angles of around 90 and at higher speeds
around 150180. This indicates that, as the speed increases, there
is a delayed discharge. It also predicted the measured carry-over
and ow-back trends reasonably well, while predicting a maximum discharge and an optimum operation as observed in the
experiments.
The potential of this approach to model complex ows in pulplifters and ow through grates is demonstrated. This modelling
technique was able to capture the complex ows through pulp-lifter grates, inside pulp-lifter chambers and out the discharge. The
work presented here is a preliminary validation of the method,
and needs further testing incorporating slurry viscosity and scale
up effects in order to apply the method to full scale grate and
pulp-lifter ow modelling.

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Acknowledgement
This project was carried out under the auspice and support of
the JKMRC.

Please cite this article in press as: Weerasekara, N.S., Powell, M.S. Performance characterisation of AG/SAG mill pulp lifters using CFD techniques. Miner.
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