THORby CI
ProductsBall Mill

THOR Ball Mill

Rotating-drum grinding for hard feeds, wet or dry.

THOR ball mill drum with its belt drive, gear reducer and motor mounted on a common base frame
Attrition + impact

A drum, media, and time

A lined drum turns at 60–75% of critical speed, lifting steel or ceramic media up the wall until it cascades onto the material bed — impact where it lands, attrition as it rolls.

Mechanism
Attrition + impact
Fineness
20 – 200 µm
Capacity
0.65 – 80 TPH
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Working principle

It is the only platform here that grinds wet as happily as dry, and media hardness can always beat the feed — clinker, iron ore, silica and refractories all yield to it.

FEEDDRUMCOLLECT

What the material passes through

  1. 1Trunnion feed inletFeed enters through the hollow support shaft
  2. 2Drum shell & linersWave or lifter liners keyed to the media size
  3. 3Grinding media chargeSteel or ceramic balls, graded large to small
  4. 4Discharge grate / trommelHolds media back while ground product exits
  5. 5Girth gear & driveTurns hundreds of tonnes smoothly for years

What is a Ball Mill?

A ball mill is a horizontal, cylindrical tumbling mill designed to grind highly abrasive, hard and mineral-dense materials into extremely fine powders or slurries. It is a critical comminution technology for heavy-duty industrial processing.

As an internationally trusted industrial-pulverizer supplier, THOR by CI builds these systems to handle both dry and wet grinding. They're widely used in mining, metallurgical, power-generation and technical-ceramic industries as a dependable, heavy-duty ore pulverizer.

Where Ball Mill sits on the particle-size scale

5 mm
1 mm
200 µm
50 µm
20 µm
Ball Mill
CoarseSub-micron

Advantages & limitations

Unbeatable on hard, abrasive ore — at the cost of mass, energy and noise.

Advantages

  • Excellent hardness handling

    Easily pulverizes materials above Mohs 5 — iron ore, gold quartz, cement clinker.

  • Flexible wet / dry grinding

    Processes dry industrial powders or wet ceramic glazes, slurries and chemical suspensions.

  • Simple, robust engineering

    A straightforward mechanical design that runs reliably for decades with minimal electronic monitoring.

  • Optimized lifter geometry

    Our lifter profiles tune the cascade-to-cataract transition, maximizing energy efficiency.

Limitations to plan for

  • Substantial foundations

    The mass of drum and media demands reinforced concrete foundations to absorb heavy vibration.

  • Low kinetic efficiency

    Much of the electrical energy goes into rotating drum and media rather than into grinding the material.

  • High acoustic output

    Steel-on-steel impact often exceeds 95 dBA — soundproof enclosures are needed in regulated areas.

Milling, mixing & bulk handling

The THOR-BM Series is built to handle heavy material flows in continuous plants.

Heavy-duty chute feeders

Robust screw feeders or spout inlets introduce hard ore and water (for wet grinding) without leakage.

Bucket elevators & screws

Discharged powder is moved by robust mechanical conveyors — bucket elevators or heavy-duty screws — to downstream stages.

Dynamic air-classifier loops

Couple the discharge to a THOR-AC Air Classifier — it returns coarse to the inlet and lifts dry-grind capacity up to 40%.

Other products

See the other four

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