AN INDUSTRIAL VALIDATION OF A PHENOMENOLOGICAL DYNAMIC SIMULATOR FOR PRIMARY GRINDING CIRCUIT

In mineral industry, grinding is the most costly node of the plant scheme and is a highly multivariable and power consuming process. Particularly for primary (SAG/AG) grinding mills, more instrumentation outputs and more powerful and significant process indicators are needed for an efficient control and optimisation applications. To overcome this lack of information, a simulator for SAG/AG mills, coupled with a hardness indicator tool, was developed to predict dynamic and steady-state responses in terms of % solid of charge, charge level, power, charge size distribution, % solid of the mill discharge, product size distribution. The simulator was validated on the Doyon (IAMGOLD Corporation) grinding circuit.