What Are the Best Alternatives to Ball Mills?

Manufacturer:  Hello Sir, Good Evening. First I'm very grateful to you because you give lot of information to many people very openly.           

Sir, I would like to know which equipment is best in place of ball mill because ball mill is very slow for grinding even fillers, you need big ball mills. So I want an equipment which is very fast in grinding for sulfur, accelerators, zinc oxides, pigments, fillers and other. Can I use colloid mills or any other options?

John Woon (Senior Latex Consultant): Good question! Yes, ball mill is one of the oldest mills used in the latex industry. To upgrade to one with higher throughput, very briefly, you have the following choices:

1) Attritor (Different people define this differently)

This is basically a batch process based on a stirred pot with minimal process variability. It is sometimes referred to as an internally agitated "high energy" ball mill.

2) Vertical or Horizontal Mill

This is a continuous process with controlled pump speed and is able to use smaller grinding media for finer particle size.There is an intensive agitation and mixing as a result of impact and shear.

3) Top Mill

This involves a rotating basket that constantly sucks the chemical into the basket whereby the particles are continuously "filtered" and ground by the media into fine particles. This is claimed to be simpler to operate and have a narrower particle size distribution compared to horizontal mill.