The effects of chamber diameter and stirrer design on dry horizontal stirred mill performance

•Pilot scale test works were performed with dry horizontal stirred mill.•Effects of chamber diameter were investigated.•Effects of stirrer design were investigated.•The use of larger chamber improved the grinding performance.•The use disc design stirrer improved the grinding efficiency. This paper focussed on investigating the effects of chamber diameter and stirrer design on cement grinding performance of a horizontal type dry stirred mill. Within the scope, pilot scale test works were undertaken with two different chamber diameters (20.4cm and 26.4cm) having the same length and three different stirrer designs (wing, cross and disc) having the same diameter (16cm). The chamber diameter tests were performed at the same stirrer design, media size and media filling. The studies concluded that, the use of larger chamber improved the grinding efficiency since 31.8% and 35.8% less energy was consumed than the smaller mill at the RRd50 of 1.41 and 1.66 respectively. This behaviour of the larger mill can be attributed to the increased gap distance between the chamber wall and stirrer edge. With regards to stirrer design, the statistical evaluations, grinding results and temperature measurements all indicated that the disc design of stirrer ground the particles more effectively at high energy levels (>40kWh/t). The use of the disc design reduced the energy consumption by 21% (at RRd50 of 3.5). This was attributed to dissipation of energy as heat since the temperature measured for the wing and cross types were higher than the disc type.