COMBINING ON-LINE PROCESS MEASUREMENTS AND MODELS TO EMPIRICALLY TEST STRATEGIES FOR PROCESS MONITORING, DIAGNOSIS AND CONTROL

Testing strategies for process monitoring, diagnosis and control is expensive, and usually requires either complex pilot plant facilities or to deal with the hard constraints posed by experimentation in real plants. The experience developing hybrid systems in the mineral processing area is discussed and its application to flotation columns and solvent extraction processes is presented. The main idea is that the essential phenomena underlying a process can be divided in two aspects: the hydrodynamics and the metallurgy. The first can be experimentally implemented in pilot plants where the main streams are mixed and separated, at a low cost. However, the process metallurgy requires expensive instrumentation, store facilities, chemical reagent consumptions. The use of metallurgic models, on-line fed with operating measured variables describing the hydrodynamics, are proposed as a sustitute.