Is ball mill used as a raw material for the commercial preparation of soda ash sodium carbonate?

Answer 1

A ball mill is a machine used for grinding chemicals, not a raw material. It's not used in the manufacture of sodium carbonate because the process they use to make sodium carbonate kicks it out as a usable powder. In the US, we don't use the synthetic way because we have a LOT of a mineral called trona in Wyoming - so much that it supplies a quarter of the world's sodium carbonate requirements. That is turned into sodium carbonate by digging it out of the ground, grinding it in a rock crusher, dissolving the sodium carbonate into water, then filtering the solution and evaporating it...once again, producing a usable powder.