D. Hodouin et al., RECONCILIATION OF MINERAL PROCESSING DATA CONTAINING CORRELATED MEASUREMENT ERRORS, International journal of mineral processing, 54(3-4), 1998, pp. 201-215
Citations number
22
Categorie Soggetti
Mineralogy,"Mining & Mineral Processing","Engineering, Chemical
Steady-state values of stream properties (species flowrates) of a mine
ral processing circuit are usually estimated by averaging values sampl
ed during a given time interval. A major source of data inaccuracy is
the integration error, i.e. the error generated by the dynamic variati
ons of the stream properties around their steady-state values. The pap
er shows that these sampling errors are significantly reduced by appro
priate reconciliation methods based on material conservation equations
. The optimal error compensation is obtained by minimizing a quadratic
function where the weighting factors take into account the integratio
n error covariance from stream to stream and species to species. The m
ethod is illustrated for a flotation circuit modelled by a state-space
representation. The data variance reduction is compared for different
weighting strategies of a quadratic reconciliation criterion. For the
studied system, it seems that ignoring measurement error correlation,
using a standard weighted least-squares criterion instead of the opti
mal quadratic function, does not degrade too much the ability of the r
econciliation procedure to reduce the data variance. (C) 1998 Elsevier
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