Shear based stirred mill power model – An adimensional analysis

•Shear based power model can be used to determine the slurry-ball media viscosity.•Tied to Ne/Re analysis indicates slurry-ball media viscosity as anisotropic.•Results suggest a real limit to the use of the shear based power model.

Stirred mill power has been modelled empirically, adimensionally and computational intensively through the use of the discrete element method and computational fluid dynamics. To this range of power modelling efforts, one more is added through the development of a shear based power for stirred milling. The resulting shear based power model incorporates dimensions of stirrer and chamber geometry as well as operating conditions. In this paper, adimensional analysis, namely Newton and Reynolds numbers, will be used in this paper to explore how this shear based model behaves over a few data sets. A discussion is included on how this model could be improved and used for characterising industrial applications.