Thank you very much for your processing question. It is common for materials to agglomerate or fuse together over time from exposure to heat, moisture, or compaction forces. Some customers will request that we use a flow agent or partitioning agent to prevent material from forming agglomerates after milling. These agents can be co-milled with the feed stock or blended in after milling.

Your dilemma requires a device that will accommodate the 55 gal block and bring it down to a particle size that can be fed into your jet mill. We did some web surfing looking for coarse crushers and shredders. We found Komar Industries (www.komarindustries.com). They have a lot of shredder options. We liked the “Tiger Electro Shear”
(www.komarindustries.com/files/tiger-electro.pdf). We do not have any working knowledge or pricing on this equipment, but it appears it may be a viable option for you.

Thank you very much for your processing question. Spices and other organic materials can be tough to grind, especially if they have high moisture content or are oily like your materials. The moisture content and oil may dramatically reduce the efficiency of the milling technology and can allow the material to agglomerate after milling.

Since your goal is fairly coarse, based on our jet milling technology, we recommend hammer mill technology. You may want to contact Pulva Corporation (www.pulva.com) for a more specific recommendation.

Our experience with Calcium Sulfate indicates that a D50 of 2 microns can be easily achieved with our Jet Mill at very attractive prices. Reducing the particle size further to 1.5 microns doubled the energy requirements. We haven’t had any requests for finer sizes with this material so we don’t know how fine a grind is achievable without testing. Previous experience does indicate however that energy consumption goes up exponentially as finer sizes are achieved and at some very fine particle size, material dependent, a point of diminishing returns is reached with jet milling technology.

If standard jet milling technologies will not produce a finished size that is fine enough then we would suggest our new LiquaJet process. This high-energy nitrogen process will definitely grind many materials substantially finer, but the process is more expensive.

Thank you for this interesting application. We talked with some delumper experts first and all agreed if a high speed hammer or tooth hits the large lumps they will tend to disintegrate to their elemental size. We believe the simplest solution would be a jaw crusher type mill set slightly larger than pea size. You would still get some fines but not nearly as many.

A more elegant but more expensive solution with a near 100% yield would be to delump the material and then pass it through a granulator to compact it all to a uniform pea size. Good luck with your project.

The first thing to consider is the condition of your size reduction equipment and the quality of the feedstock. Inspect your feeder, extension hopper, pulverizer, transfer piping, and collection system. Confirm that your equipment is clean, properly maintained, and operating correctly. Discoloration is often the result of metallic contamination, usually iron, from mill liners and piping, which is the result of erosion by the product sliding over metal parts at high velocity. This erosion is normally only seen when the material being milled has a Mohs hardness of five or more. This contamination by softer products can be eliminated by using nonmetallic liners, such as polyurethane or UHMW polyethylene. The higher Mohs hardness products, such as quartz, may require harder liners ranging from metals like hardened tool steels to sintered tungsten carbide, or various ceramic linings like alumina or silicon carbide.