Development of a model to evaluate the settling time of mineral particles

Abstract

Settling time is one of the most important parameters in mineral processing industry, to design flow of processing and to define input data rate. It can be defined as a function of average particle settling velocity through a fluid medium and the target of this research is to develop a model to evaluate the settling time of mineral particulates. During this study, parameters which affect the settling time were identified, existing models were evaluated and error functions were introduced to coincide theoretical results and experimental results, a new function was formulated and verified to measure the settling time. Characteristics of particles such as shape, size and density as well as the characteristics of medium such as viscosity, density and the temperature were identified as the parameters that affected. Steel and glass particles in spherical shape were selected with known density for the experiment. Newton’s law and Stokes law that developed theoretically were referenced with their defined limitations to take experimental results on measuring the settling time of mineral particles. To reduce the gap between theoretical results and experimental results, new error functions were introduced to Newton’s law and also another relationship was derived theoretically to calculate the time taken to reach particles’ terminal velocity.