Evaluation strategy for the control of the copper removal process based on oxidation–reduction potential

• A mechanistic model to estimate the relations between ORP and copper concentration is established.
• A fuzzy process evaluation method based on the mechanistic model is proposed.
• A control strategy for copper removal process is established integrated with the process evaluation method.
• The effectiveness of the proposed evaluation method and control strategy is confirmed through industrial experiments.

The copper removal process purifies copper from leaching solutions with zinc powder in reactors. Due to the complex reaction mechanism and unavailability of online measurements, zinc powder is usually added inexactly, which easily leads to unstable production. This paper proposes an online evaluation method based on oxidation–reduction potential (ORP) for the control of the copper removal process. A kinetic model is designed to translate the production requirements to evaluation indexes of ORP, and the process is then graded by evaluating the fuzzified ORP and its trends according to these indexes. By analyzing these evaluation grades, the process condition is divided into several classes, and each condition class corresponds to a control method set. The industrial experiments show that the copper removal performance is improved by using the proposed evaluation and control strategy.