REAL-TIME RECONCILIATION OF MINERAL PROCESSING PLANT-DATA USING BILINEAR MATERIAL BALANCE-EQUATIONS COUPLED TO EMPIRICAL DYNAMIC-MODELS

On-line material balance in mineral processing plants are extremely us eful to upgrade the quality of the information, delivered by the senso rs, which is used for manual or automatic control and real-time optimi zation strategies. A method for on-line reconciliation of flowrates an d compositions of complex mineral processing plants is proposed. Measu red process variables are filtered and unmeasured ones estimated by mi nimizing a criterion which contains deviations between filtered and me asured values and deviations to process model equations. The model con sists of two parts: steady-state mass conservation equations around th e flowsheet nodes and dynamic transfer functions and pure delays repre senting the stream dynamic behaviour. The reconciliation method is tes ted on a simulated dynamic flotation plant. In comparison to on-line s teady-state reconciliation methods, the dynamic models significantly i mprove the quality of the estimated process variables, because they av oid to have to compensate for process dynamics by averaging techniques which distort the signal phases and amplitudes.