Improvement Opportunities using Time dynamic Simulations

Other conference contribution, 2017

Minerals processing have been exposed to an ever increasing pressure to improve operations to maintain profitable mining and extraction of minerals and metals. Assuring product quality and achieving sufficient levels of recovery, process understanding and operation have been the key at many sites. Maintaining the desired production rate and quality is a task involving process engineers, control engineers, operators, metallurgists and different branches of management, which all have different opinions. Many circuits have been designed for tonnages lower than of today’s operating point, and studies around where the bottlenecks are located and theoretical limits are common. To assure only well-established working solutions are applied to the actual plant, one approach is to build time dependent dynamic simulation models of the plant, this approach and the options it poses will in this paper be outlined. In this paper, a perspective on a modeling and simulation structure around the plant is presented, followed by the basis behind the modeling technique. Today’s core areas of applications for these types of models are presented together with an illustrating example, and finally a finishing outlook into possible future extensions of the method is given.