Cost And Performance Optimization Of A Tertiary Crushing Stage

Paper in proceeding, 2015

There is increasing demand to optimise performance and profit of crushing plants. Research in this area has resulted in the development of numerous optimisation tools, and resent research has shown that the quality aspects of production have great influence on the optimisation results. The quality, cost, profit and capacity of a product is influenced by several parameters, and in order to control all of these parameters it is necessary to use some sort of optimisation software. In this paper, a novel approach use the parameters cost, profit, capacity and quality in order to perform a multi objective optimization of a crushing plant is presented. As an example a tertiary crushing stage consistent of a cone crusher and a vertical shaft impact crusher (VSI) is used as base for the designed objective function. The process has a given set of constraints that represents the conditions normal in these type of crushing applications. The first step in this paper is to identify if the range of the constraints can cause undesirable production costs when reaching for a given product property. The next step in the optimization shows how a strategy for relaxing constraint can increase overall productivity and still reach certain product properties. The conclusions made in this work are that multi objective optimization is essential when optimizing crushing plant production against multiple objectives. Relaxation of constraints can increase the overall performance of the crushing plant.