This document discusses various size reduction equipment, including hammer mills, ball mills, and disintegrators. It provides advantages and disadvantages of hammer mills, such as their ability to control particle size but potential for heat buildup. Ball mills are described as using impact between rapidly moving balls and material to reduce size. Key advantages are their ability to produce fine powder and handle wet or dry materials. Disintegrators work via impact of fast-spinning beaters inside a drum and are useful for reducing very hard drugs to a fine powder.

1. SIZE REDUCTION
Suraj Mandal
Assistant Professor,
M. Pharm (Pharmaceutics)
Pt. Rajendra Prasad Smarak College
of Pharmacy, Puranpur

18. VARIOUS
EQUIPMENTS USE
IN SIZE REDUCTION

22. ADVANTAGES OF HAMMER MILL
• It is rapid in action, and is capable of grinding many
different types of materials.
• They are easy to install and operate, the operation
is continuous.
• There is little contamination of the product with
metal abraded from the mill as no surface move
against each other.
• The particle size of the material to be reduced can
be easily controlled by changing the speed of the
rotor, hammer type, shape and size of the screen.

23. DISADVANTAGES
• Heat buildup during milling is more,
therefore, product degradation is possible.
• Hammer mills cannot be employed to mill
sticky, fibrous and hard materials.
• The screens may get clogged. Wearing of mill
and screen is more with abrasive materials.

24. BALL MILL
• These are also knows as tumbling mills.
• Principle: The ball mill works on the principle of
impact between the rapidly moving balls and the
powder material, both enclosed in a hollow cylinder.
• At low speeds, the ball roll over each other and
attrition (rubbing action) will be the predominate
mode of action. Thus, in the ball mill, impact or
attrition or both are responsible for the size
reduction.

28. Advantages:
• It can produce very fine powder.
• Ball mill is used for both wet and dry grinding
processes.
• Toxic substances can be ground, as the cylinder is
closed system.
• Rod or bars can also be used as grinding media.
• (example: Sticky material are size reduced) In ball mill,
• installation, operation and labour costs are low.

29. Disadvantages:
• The ball mill is a very noisy machine.
• Ball mill is a slow process.
• Soft, tacky, fibrous material cannot be milled
by ball mill.

32. The Disintegrator
Principle- The size reduction in disintegrator is done by Impact.
Construction-
 It consist of a steel drum having a shaft in the centre.
 The shaft contains a disc, on which 4 beaters are fixed.
 Rotation Speed- 5000-7000 RPM
 Side and upper surface of the drum is rough and undulating.
 The lower part of the drum has detachable screen or sieve (definite pore size).
Working-
 The beaters are mainly responsible for grinding but are helped by the undulation
of the inner surface and roughness of drum.
 The material is fed to beaters, through hopper.
 Materials are broken by impact of the beaters.
 Due to high velocity of beaters the air velocity inside the chamber is increased.
 The air is allowed to pass through an outlet on which dust bag is tied, which
retains the fine particles of powder.

33. Diagram of Disintegrator in section
Use-
 The Mill is used to powder all
type of drugs including very
hard drugs.
 The drug should be dried before
feeding into the disintegrator to
get fine powder.