Ball mill VS wet pan mill in gold gravity separation
To get the real gold, there are three most popular methods:cyanidation, gold gravity separation and amalgamation. Each method features its advantages and disadvantages, and they are suitable for different miners with different capital ability and for local environment situation.
For those big CIL plants or individual miners with enough financial ability, ball mill is the most ideal equipment because of its large capacity, easy operation and fine output size which can be as fine as 200 to 325 mesh. Usually when the ball mill used, the ore slurry classifying equipment will be equipment: spiral classifier or hydrocyclone. The point is that if the ball mill is small model, spiral classifier is prefered as its cost is low. If the ball mill is big model, hydrocyclone is necessary. The small ball mill working with spiral classifier is as follows:
Besides ball mill, there is another ore dressing grinding mill machine, that is wet pan mill, also called chilean mill. Wet pan mill is the most popular grinding mill for gold ore gravity separation and amalgamation in Africa and South America for its lower cost than ball mill and easy operation. The following is the flow chart drawing in which wet pan mill is used in gravity separation. The working procedures is crushing→grinding→knelson centrifugal concentrator selection（to get the big size free gold）→shaking table(to select the fine gold from the ore tailling).
Actually in small gold gravity plant, ball mill can also be used to replace the wet pan mil. And it can achieve same grinding effect with the wet pan mill, the following is the flow chart of ball mill in gold gravity plant.
In gold gravity separation plant, whether the miner use ball mill or wet pan mill, he can only get the gold concentrate, after that he can adopt amalgamation or cyanidation to get the pure gold, which is another topic and we do not extend it in this article.
To conclude, in gold gravity separation plant, ball mill and wet pan mill are both accetable. The difference is that ball mill is more suitable for big mining companies or individual miners with enough capaital, and wet pan mill is the choice of small miners who want get gold quickly with lowest price.
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