A Holistic Approach to Control and Optimization of an Industrial R Ball Milling Circuit

Anglo Platinum's control schema for a Run-of-Mine (ROM) ball milling comminution circuit follows a layered approach that involves basic control (regulatory, interlock and sequence control), fuzzy logic rule-based and model predictive control. This allows for a robust approach to optimization. This paper reviews the above control schema for a ROM ball milling circuit and discusses the benefits that have been achieved from implementing optimization using Mode Predictive Control (MPC) to cater for a wide range of feed conditions.