State of the art in copper hydrometallurgic processes control

Abstract

A review of the state of art and trends in automation and control of hydrometallurgic processes is presented. Besides the great expansion of hydrometallurgic processes world-wide, there are a number of unsolved problems related to lack of instrumentation, lack of process knowledge, odd operating practices, and in general, lack of use of data management and processing. In general, process control of local objectives are frequently achieved, however, application of mature and new techniques, successfully adopted in other mineral processing plants, are seldom reported. In the near future it is expected that intelligent techniques will be incorporated to solve a large variety of problems. r

Desarrollo de un Analizador en línea, de las concentraciones de Cobre en soluciones acuosas del proceso de Extracción por Solvente, mediante procesamiento de imágenes

“…La investigación en este proceso, ha sido enfocada principalmente en los procesos químicos y equipos asociados. Hasta el presente, el control de los procesos de SX-EW ha recaído sobre simples lazos de control y sintonía manual, con operadores manipulando activamente los set-point (SP) para controladores de nivel básico o de primer nivel (Komulainen et al, 2009;Bergha, Jämsä-Jounela, & Hodouinc, 2001). Un factor clave que reduce la eficiencia de plantas de SX es la metodología reactiva que los operadores de estas plantas están obligados a realizar, basados en análisis de laboratorio de los flujos fuera de línea, los cuales ya han sido procesados a través de la planta (Li, Yuan, Yang, & Huang, 2007).…”

On-line monitoring of aqueous base metal solutions with transmittance spectrophotometry

“…The benefit is a potential increase in stability in plant operations that can lead to improved plant performance and higher financial returns (Haavisto et al, 2008). Despite its potential, online spectrophotometry is not a mature technology in the metallurgical industries yet, as some of the equipment may be sensitive to external disturbances and would therefore require a high degree of maintenance (Bergh et al, 2001).…”

Dynamic modelling of an industrial copper solvent extraction process

“…Advanced control of a solvent extraction plant would make it possible to keep the process variables close to their optimal values, thus increasing the amount of copper produced and reducing the amount of chemicals and energy consumed (Kordosky, 2002;Jämsä-Jounela, 2001;Bergh et al, 2001;Hughes and Saloheimo, 2000).…”