Effect of liner design on performance of a HICOM® mill over the predicted liner life cycle

•DEM with geometry evolution can provide valuable insights for liner design.•Small geometry differences in new liners can produce large variations in wear.•Wear on a new liner does not always reflect wear throughout the liner life cycle.•Relative changes in mill life time performance can be for different liner designs.•Different wear evolutions can lead to quite different mill operating performance.

The life cycle performance of two alternative mill liner designs have been predicted using DEM with a calibrated wear model and using a geometric mill liner evolution method. The HICOM 110 mill was used as a case study to demonstrate how such a model can be used to help understand the full life cycle performance of a mill. This mill was chosen because of the availability of validated calibration constants for the wear model for this mill. The comparison of the evolution sequences shows that initial small differences in wear profiles for different lifters can lead to quote a different life cycle behaviour — both for the erosion behaviour of the liner and for the performance of the mill. They also demonstrate that the wear predicted for the new liner does not necessarily well reflect the whole of life wear process as the feedback between the wear and flow can strongly influence the liner life cycle.