Design and Analysis of Mixture Experiments for Ball Mix Selection in the Ball Milling

Abstract

Purpose: Ball milling is a popular process for obtaining fine powders in the part and material industry. One of important issues in the ball milling is to produce particles with a uniform size. Although many factors affect uniformity of particles, this paper focuses on the choice of ball diameter. Consider a ball milling where balls can be taken with three different diameters. The purpose of this paper is to find a ball mix which minimizes the average particle size. Methods: Ball diameters are selected as 10mm, 3mm, and 0.5mm. In order to find an optimum mixing ratio, the method of mixture experiments is employed in this paper. Taguchi's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for small-er-the-better type is also used to analyze experimental data. Results: According to the experimental result, SNR is maximized when the ball mix is taken as either 7:3:0 or 6:4:0. Such mixing ratios can be technically validated in terms of porosity reduction. Conclusion: The ball mixing technique presented in this paper provides a useful way to improve the production efficiency with a low cost.