KCA's laboratory facility is home to one of the very few pilot-scale High-Pressure Grinding Roll (HPGR) units in North America — a ThyssenKrupp Polycom PILOTWAL capable of producing between 6 and 8 tonnes of crushed product per hour. The unit can be used to define both operational parameters and sizing for full-scale production HPGR installations.
High-pressure grinding rolls deliver superior energy efficiency on hard, abrasive ores. The micro-cracking generated through inter-particle compression improves downstream leach kinetics — often substantially improving heap leach recoveries vs. conventional crushing. KCA's work to date has focused on using HPGR for primary comminution in heap leach and milling flowsheets.
Bench-top HPGR units can't replicate full-scale roll geometry, surface speed, or pressure distribution. The products developed from KCA's pilot unit are equivalent to those produced by larger-scale units — so column leach results from HPGR-treated samples translate directly to commercial expectations.
Motors: 2 × 30 kW
Rolls: 0.5 m diameter, 0.3 m length, Studded
Gap: 2–37 mm
Feed: Batch
Discharge: 75% Center, 25% Edge
Throughput optimization, energy modeling, screen-classification studies, and integrated downstream testing including column leach, CIL, and Merrill-Crowe. Sample sizes from 1 tonne for initial scoping to 50+ tonnes for bankable studies. Process development testwork available for ore-specific HPGR scale-up.
Selected recent projects where KCA delivered this service. All from our portfolio of 500+ engineering projects.
Whether you’re at scoping stage or ready to break ground, KCA has the lab capacity, engineering bench, and EPCM experience to deliver.
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