Data reconciliation of mineral liberation distributions

Since several decades, most measurements in mineral processing plants have been reconciled to improve their accuracy and validity. However, existing methods cannot simultaneously reconcile mineral grades, liberation distributions, and elemental assays. This work proposes a multilinear framework for reconciling measurements from an industrial flotation cell, including particles flowrates, solids fractions, particle size distributions, elemental and mineralogical assays, and mineral liberation distributions for complex lithologies. Results demonstrate improved reliability of performance indicators, such as recovery, by enforcing mass balance equations. A limited amount of minerals are considered by iterating on the gangue elemental composition, thus greatly reducing the problem size.