The aim of a research cooperation between the Chair of Mineral Processing (Montanuniversitaet Leoben) and the Austrian company CEMTEC - Cement and Mining Technology - is to investigate the grinding mechanisms in vertical roller mills. A widespread argument for vertical roller mills is the comminution in a particle bed instead of using stochastic grinding. In contrast to stochastic grinding, the particle bed comminution shows a better specific energy consumption. Special interest lies in the influence of the high circulating load and the classification process. For this reason, a laboratory vertical roller mill had been engineered, constructed and reviewed.This PhD thesis describes the design of the VRM200 laboratory vertical roller mill with a 200 mm grinding table diameter and an external classifier-drawback. Experimental results show that this new classifier-drawback allows to specify the internal mass flow and the circulating load of the mill during normal operation. Also an insight to the classification process inside the mill is possible. By using design of experiments (DoE), important input factors to the milling process could be identified and reviewed. The suitability tests carried out using 3 materials - Siderite, Calcite and Hematite – confirm that the VRM200 is fully functional and meets the industrial standards. Furthermore, the VRM200 is compared with the semi industrial pilot plant VRM600 (670 mm table diameter) regarding two standard grindability tests, the ZEISEL-Test and the Optimized Comminution Sequence (OCS).