Abstract
This work was conducted to find the operating characteristics of an efficient wet grinding system designed to obtain fine rice husk ash powder. Once the rice husk was combusted and the thermal energy was recovered from the furnace, the ash was fed and pulverized in the grinding system resulting a fine powder to be used as a supplementary adding material to the portland cement. Grinding time (15, 30, 45 min), impeller speed (250, 500, 750 rpm), and mixed ratio (6.7, 8.4, 11.l, 20.9) were three operating factors examined for the performance of a wet-type stirred ball mill grinding system. For the operating conditions employed, mean diameter of fine ash powder, specific energy input, and grinding energy efficiency were in the range of $2.83{\sim}9.58{\mu}m,\;0.5{\sim}6.73kWh/kg,\;and\;0.51{\sim}3.27m^2/Wh$, respectively. With the wet-type stirred ball mill grinding system used in this study, the grinding energy efficiency decreased with the increase in total grinding time, impeller speed, and mixed ratio. The difference in specific surface area of powder linearly increased with logarithm in total number of impeller revolution and the grinding energy efficiency linearly decreased. Grinding time of 45 min, impeller speed of 500 rpm, and mixed ratio of 6.7 were chosen as the best operating condition. At this condition, mean particle diameter of the fine ash, grinding energy efficiency, grinding throughput, and specific energy input were $2.84{\mu}m,\;2.28m^2/Wh,\;0.17kg/h$, and 2.03kWh/kg, respectively. Wet fine grinding which generates no fly dust causing pollution and makes continuous operation easy, is appeared to be a promising solution to the automatization of rice husk ash grinding process.
