On-line flotation performance advisor: method development and benchmarking

Flotation is a common and important part of many mineral beneficiation processes, especially in gold applications; and therefore, its performance is essential to keep as well trimmed as possible. In this paper, an optimization method for the gold recovery by means of adjusting mass pulls of flotation tanks is introduced and tested with process simulations. The target of optimization was here to reduce the gold grade in final tailings while keeping the gold grade of both final concentrate and rougher concentrate in a certain range. Two optimization algorithms, differential evolution and interior-point method, were tested. The investigated hypothesis was “history-optimized control setpoints improve performance in future”, and it was shown to be correct, as indicated by the reduced gold grade in final tailings. Here, the methods demonstrated that the mass pull increase, especially in rougher flotation, was often favourable.