The ability to optimise your plant’s processes is a fundamental benefit – and is also where your digital transformation project will quickly pay for itself, often before the implementation has even been completed.
Process optimisation opportunities using a minerals processing solution can be identified in several ways.
Looking at the alignment between measured and calculated data will allow your metallurgists to detect instruments or sampling practices that may need to be assessed. This means issues can be resolved before they escalate.
For instance, if a plant’s filter conveyor weightometer’s measured value is greater than the calculated value, this indicates either that the weightometer is over-reading or the flotation matrix is not producing enough of a particular concentrate due to inaccurate inputs. This prompts metallurgists to check the calibration of the weightometer to ensure it is reading correctly, and check the assays used in the flotation matrix to ensure these samples are representative.
In the following example, the flows in and out of a plant area are expected to be roughly the same. In this example, the input streams are represented by the neutral thickener common (consisting of four volume flow instruments) and the output streams are represented by the Zn electrolyte filters (consisting of three instruments). The chart demonstrates that the alignment between the measured and calculated data is poor for the neutral thickener common stream, indicating that maintenance resources should be allocated to these instruments. After maintenance of the instruments, the measured data for the input and output streams align.