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.
