2014-Sustainable Industrial Processing Summit
SIPS 2014 Volume 2: Mineral Processing
| Editors: | Kongoli F |
| Publisher: | Flogen Star OUTREACH |
| Publication Year: | 2014 |
| Pages: | 446 pages |
| ISBN: | 978-1-987820-04-1 |
| ISSN: | 2291-1227 (Metals and Materials Processing in a Clean Environment Series) |
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Optimization of Mineral Process
Xiaowei Pan1;1UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG, Johannesburg, South Africa (zuid Afrika);
Type of Paper: Regular
Id Paper: 261
Topic: 2
Abstract:
The ore beneficiation at a mine could be described as complex and expensive, involving many balancing processes where material flow rates, size, density and other factors must all be in balance, if any degree of plant optimization is to be achieved. To determine the optimum setup for maximizing throughput at the final step in the beneficiation process, such as the dense media separation units, a mine optimizer is developed using constraint-based global optimization.
The Mine Optimizer uses plant unit availability, capacity in tons per hour (t/h), change in material size (between crushers) and other constraints. The result is that improving cheaper upstream processes, such as blasting, can significantly increase the throughput of expensive downstream processes, like crushing, through improved fragmentation of the ROM ore. For instance, if the ROM ore is not in the required range, the plant production is unbalanced and consequently the mine could loss production by 10-20%, even 50% in the worst case. On one hand, a finer ROM ore may result in lower utilisation of both crushing and coarse separation by 50%. Meanwhile other process units are running at 100% capacity, such as slime and tailing dumping. In addition, a finer ROM ore may destroy the mineral value as well, such as in the cases of mining coal, iron ore, and diamond ore, where a higher price is for the products of larger size.