Pilot scale SAG mill test work is used for the design and scale up of plant SAG mills and for experiments into the mill fundamentals. An advantage of modelling such a mill is that the entire mill can be modelled along with more than 90 per cent of the measured PSD. We have been working in collaboration with the Julius Kruttschnitt Mineral Research Centre to understand particle flows and breakage in such mills (Cleary et al., 2003; Morrison et al., 2001). Figure 9(a) shows a cutaway view of the JKMRC 6 in :(D) 2in. ( L) pilot scale mill. This is a complete mill model and includes the feed end, the main/belly/circumferential lifters, the end lifters, the grate, the pulp lifters, the discharge cone and the external mill shell. This configuration has 16 belly lifters with 10 face angles, 16 lifters on the feed end cone and eight lifters on the discharge end. A representative SAG mill charge was used, with a rock top size of 122 mm and the bottom size resolved in the DEM model chosen to be 6 mm, so that > 90 per cent of the charge was correctly represented in the model. The fill level was 39 per cent with a ball load of 5 per cent giving around 425,000 particles. The mill rotation rate was 24 rpm corresponding to 76 per cent critical.
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