The wear of grinding media in wet grinding accounts for a substantial portion of milling costs. Accordingly, how to identify the conditions that accelerate the corrosive wear and thereby minimize not only the wear, but also the adverse effect on flotation, has been the subject of continued investigation at the Mineral Resources Research Center (Minneapolis, Minnesota).
Electrochemical studies have shown that corrosion currents obtained by superposing the polarization curves of pyrrhotite and grinding media electrodes determined under abrasion (referred to as Method I) correlated well with the corrosion currents estimated from marked ball wear tests (MBWTs).1,2 With this approach, however, since all of the ground pyrrhotite is not in contact with grinding balls at any given moment, the cathode-to-anode area ratio used to arrive at the total corrosion currents would probably be overestimated.
A more conventional approach involves the extrapolation of the linear portions of the cathodic and anodic...
