Liner wear is one of the major problems for the design and maintaining of the tumbling mills and an effective and efficient numerical approach can significantly reduce the cost for studying liner wear. To obtain an engineering level approach, a coarse grain level wear model is proposed in this paper. A multi-level study on the liner wear was conducted to assess the adequacy of the coarse grain level approach based on the simulation results of the original-level approach - Discrete Element Method (DEM) combined with the wear model Shear Impact Energy Model (SIEM). Quasi-mono-size distribution and polydisperse size distribution were used in the simulations. The reasons for the deviations of the results predicted by the coarse grain level wear model were discussed and analyzed. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.