Abstract
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 to maximize the production throughput as objective function, using constraint-based global optimization. The mine optimizer uses a search engine to find a set of operational conditions, that will help achieve the maximum production within all constraints, such as the availability of plant, the capacity of all press units; the change in material size and property (between crushers) and other operational conditions at the mineral process plant. 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 up to 50% of production loss in the worst case. On one hand, a finer ROM ore may result in lower production of both crushing and coarse separation by 50%, while other process units are running at 100% capacity, such as slimes 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 paid for the products of larger size.