Mineral Process Design Under Uncertainly: A Case Study Approach
Systematic methods and tools for managing the complexity
Process Synthesis & Design (T4-1P)
Keywords: process design, uncertainly, stochastic programming, grey programming
The objective of this work is twofold: to analyze the nature of the uncertainly and to analyze the usefulness of the different programming techniques in the mineral processing.
Several chemical products like metals (copper, zinc, aluminium), salts (potassium nitrate, lithium carbonate), and non-metallics (cements) are produced from ores and brines. Because of the large production small improvements can mean important savings and/or revenues. Therefore, optimal process designs or process retrofits are important issues. The uncertainty in these processes is associated to the variations in the grade and chemical characteristics of the raw material, variations in the product prices and vagueness in the models used in the design process.
Different mathematical programming techniques are available in the literature to consider the uncertainty, for example grey programming, fuzzy programming and stochastic programming. These techniques can be applied depending on the characteristics of the uncertainty and on the kind of result/problem that want to be considered.
In this work several case studies are used to study the uncertainty in the process design/retrofit of mineral sector. The results give some insight on the usefulness of the programming techniques to solve these design problems and on the future work needed to include uncertainty in mineral process design/retrofit.
Presented Tuesday 18, 13:30 to 17:00, in session Process Synthesis & Design (T4-1P).
