Vibration ball mills: Have they a place in pigment and resin technology?

The vibrational ball mill has been around for close on fifty years and yet, it seems to have made only minor impacts in the pigments and resin industries. Looking at the techniques of vibrational milling one notes that such a method of comminution, or grinding, is very much faster than, say, a conventional ball mill. Some larger vibration mills achieve an energy input of more than twenty times that in the tumbler mill. So one asks: why have not such miils been taken up by the paint and associated industries? The idea is technically attractive in which the grinding media are given an acceleration far in excess of that achieved by gravity in the conventional mill. For those who are not familiar with the vibrational ball mill it might be added that the container holding the grinding media is oscillated by an out-of-balance system, over a relatively small amplitude. This causes the grinding media inside to tap against one another and, if they are spherical, to revolve on their individual axes.