The goal of this paper was to explore total media wear by defining a total media wear model incorporating abrasive, corrosive and impact wear mechanisms, develop three ore-metal-environment specific laboratory tests to determine model parameters, and calibrate and verify model with real system data. The development is based on the possibility of estimating energy dissipated in impact and abrasion by using a discrete element charge motion model for mill simulation. The results show, for the cases studied, an improvement in the predictive ability of this methodology as compared with the Bond abrasion test. Further work is needed in order to improve test procedure. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.