Mathematical Modeling of Mineral Processing Unit Operations

B.Venkoba Rao
Engineering and Industrial Services, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Pune 411001, India

Abstract

Unit operations applied in mineral processing are wide and varied. Mathematical
treatment of the subject will aid in the better assessment and improvement of the process.
For this we have to understand each of the process individually and then link them up to
get the better idea of the circuit behavior. This paper briefly explains some of the
concepts in modeling and simulation in mineral processing, without diving too much into
mathematics. More focus will be given on the author’s earlier work on mathematical
modeling.

Introduction

Mineral processing is a part of particulate technology. Often it is treated as a branch of

chemical engineering and/or metallurgy. The unit operations are part of those found in
chemical engineering. Since a project of mineral processing is taken up only when a
techno-economic viability of the project is assessed feasible, in true sense mineral
processing is a business that needs to sustain over time as it calls for a huge investment to
start with and a large human work force. It should withstand the variations in the
operation as well as those in the feed quality over the time. It has to produce product that
suits smelter contracts by constantly addressing the variations in the plant and the feed
input. Feed to the plant often varies as no two locations of the mine contain similar
quality of material that is received at the plant. If we understand how the process is going
to be affected with regard to operation and design variables of various unit operations, the
quality of the product can be maintained, improved and/or sustained over the period. In
this regard mathematical modeling of the operation has taken an important seat in mineral
processing. These models take the inputs from the minimum sensors that are installed in
the plant and construct the material flow rate, size distribution, grade, pulp densities
across the plant network along with how the particles behave in each equipment and thus
enable controller models to take corrective actions by adjusting manipulated variables
such as water flow rates, feed flow rates and operating set points. There is a binding
between various unit operations as output of one unit is the feed to the subsequent
downstream unit operation and many a times there are recycle streams. There is an
environmental binding in the mineral processing operations as the slurry tails released
from the plant should not contaminate the water table or pollute air or release the
powdery mass of tails as dust. Our mineral wealth is also limited. It needs to be
conserved and judiciously used. Mathematical models also help in their judicious use and
conservation by optimum utilization of the resources.

The whole of mineral processing can be visualized in simple terms as size-reduction,

classification and separation followed by allied operations of solid-liquid separation
and/or granulation. Size reduction is a highly energy intensive process aimed at liberation
of the minerals/particles from the matrix so as to enable the desired particles to be
segregated later into a high quality product without loosing much of valuables into the
tails. The size reduction will liberate the valuable minerals from the gangue. The cost of
energy spent in size reduction is significant to the overall cost of the operation. No fixed
liberation size can be defined for the ore as liberation is a distributed entity showing a
relation between particle size and amount that is liberated. The finer is the size more will
be the liberation. But since fine size liberation adds to cost of the grinding and since fine
particles are difficult to separate, generally a size called "mesh of grind" that caters to
techno-economic aspects is agreed upon and whole of the grinding should produce a
mass below this mesh of grind so that further separations will give a good grade and
recovery product. Liberation spectrum is generally represented by a garland distribution
in its frequency distribution representation or in terms of a cumulative beta distribution.
These distributions imply that there are valuable and gangue particles that are completely
liberated. Between these two extremes there are particles that are gradually distributed in
grade with some amount of valuable and some amount of gangue. The graded particles
containing significant amounts of both valuable and gangue minerals are referred to as
middlings. The amount of middlings and their inclusion or exclusion into the final
product play a vital role to the grade-recovery curve of the plant. Ore microscopy is a tool
to aid quantification of liberation. Leaching of valuables is sometimes followed once the
particles are exposed on the surface by way of liberation. These operations are part of
hydrometallurgy route of metal extraction.

Size reduction of the solid particles starts with the explosions at the mine site. The solid
mass has to be reduced to mesh of grind in staged operations from explosions followed
by crushing and then followed by grinding/ fine grinding. There is no efficient size-
reduction equipment that can reduce whole exploded mass to mesh of grind in one go. So
reduction has to be in stages. This also ensures better utilization of energy. Generally size
classifiers are used to increase the efficiency of size-reduction by way classifying
particles that need further size-reduction and those that do not. Population balance
equations which are nothing but integro-differential equations are used to mathematically
track process of size-reduction. These equations are solved to obtain output size
distribution from the input size distribution. Population balance models are better over
the earlier size-energy relationships of Kick, Bond and Rittinger as they describe entire
profile of the product size distribution and not just focus on any one percentile like the
80% size in Bond's method. These models characterize the material breakage in terms of
two important functions namely breakage size distribution and breakage rate distribution
and thus transfer particle mass in one size class to its lower size classes, in the event of
breakage.

Classification of particles according to size is done using industrial screens or cyclones.

Particle classification will ensure that the feed gets distributed into two product streams,
one relatively coarser to the other. The coarser product is generally recycled back to size
reduction, while the finer product is sent to the downstream separation units. Sometimes
classification is done in staged operation with different classifier circuit configurations. A
sigmoid curve representing the amount material of each individual size recovered to one
of the product streams from its feed stream, characterizes classification operation.
Mathematically, it acts as a transforming function to calculate product size distributions
from its feed.

The concentration of valuables is a part of separation operations. For a rich grade coarse
particle ore, simple sizing or sorting by color identification would be a solution of
enrichment. However, when the liberation characteristics are complicated or when
particle sizes are too small they need to be concentrated physically by other means. The
inherent physical/ physico-chemical properties of the valuable particles against gangue
are exploited to segregate them into a concentrate. Particle density differences or
hydrophobic surface characteristics or differences in attraction by magnetic field or their
conducting and non-conducting characteristics are exploited for concentration when the
particle sizes are relatively small. Gravity concentration is an environment friendly
technique to concentrate particles when the valuables show remarkably high density
difference to the gangue particles. Flow of particles in fluid and hindered settling
characteristics play a vital role in gravity concentration. A number of equipment with
varying design and operational conditions are available for gravity concentration, but
performance all equipment can be mathematically tracked in simple terms by sigmoid
curves representing recovery of individual density class particles to the concentrate from
its feed. The profile of these partition curves can be related to operating and design
variables. However, in literature we find more focused efforts to model individual unit
operation such as spirals, jigs in greater detail.

Flotation is one operation that turned large old tailing dumps into viable projects.
Flotation can beneficiate particles smaller than that could be handled by gravity units by
using hydrophobic characteristics. Reagent chemistry plays very important role in
flotation. Several types of reagents like conditioners, frothers, pH modifiers and
dispersants are added at varying amounts at different parts of flotation circuit. Species
floatability characteristics are used to model these unit operations. The literature on this is
wide and varied. The number of operational variables affecting flotation is very large.
There are different phases involved air, pulp and froth. There are models which have
looked at flotation operation from probabilistic view also.

Magnetic separations are generally used to concentrate ferromagnetic minerals such as

magnetite from the diamagnetic minerals such as quartz. They are also used in beach
sand deposit beneficiation. Magnetite, ilmenite, garnet and monazite are magnetic in
nature. Magnetite and ilmenite are conducting minerals and hence are thrown from high
tension separator surface while garnet and monazite are non-conducting minerals that get
pinned to the high tension separator surface. So a combination of magnetic and
electrostatic separators is used to separate the minerals for beach sand deposits.
Mathematically one can look at magnetic recovery as a function of applied magnetic field
which gives a sigmoid kind of curve. Electrostatic separations are more often done in
stages as single separator is seldom able to do a complete separation. It has been seen that
mass fraction remaining in the nonconductor product for a particular mineral species
versus number of pass follows a straight-line relation on a semi-log graph.
In all processes it may be difficult establish fundamental process relationships that bind
the parameters of the model with operating and design variables. In such situations, quite
often empirical regression relations have been obtained and applied successfully. Such
relations are data specific and may not hold good over long ranges of operating and
design variables, but will serve the specific need within the range of study for which they
are considered. Moreover, the measured data on which the regression relationships are
built should be sound, methodically obtained and reliable.

In the following sections we will look at some of the typical mathematical models that
help in understanding some of the basic concepts of modeling although it is not possible
to treat the whole subject compressively here. Some of the author's earlier work on
mathematical modeling is used here to illustrate the usefulness of mathematical
modeling.

Plant Audit and data Reconciliation

In the previous sections we have learnt that often the plant feed is subjected to variations
that affect achieving targeted product grade and recovery. Design and operating variables
have to be adjusted to get a better product when the feed quality is subjected to variation.
It will be very difficult to judge what could be the best parameters unless a mathematical
model of the circuit is known or the operator is highly professional. It is difficult to get
the overall picture of the plant at any given instance even by an experienced operator. A
better way to study and build such models is by way of conducting regular steady-state
plant audits for gathering information on flow rates, size distributions, pulp densities and
species behavior and understanding effect of operating conditions on the circuit and
updating the model parameters. Firstly, it is required to reconcile the noise prone
measured data for mass balance. This is referred to as data reconciliation wherein using
minimal data adjustments the mass flow rates of all the size and mineral species are
balanced across the circuit. Some of the information may also be missing. Using such
reconciled data of the circuit, mathematical models of the circuit behavior can be built
that aid in plant improvement.

A simple check on separator data

Question is, is there a simple way to verify whether the three given size distributions of a
classifier or separator belong to it and hold mass balance? Unless one verifies the mass
balance from the flow split of solid particles, the question is difficult to answer. However,
the difference similarity concepts are handy to verify whether given three size
distributions of the separator belong to it or not without needing to know the flow split of
solid particles to each of the product stream.

It has been shown that the three size distributions of a separator are difference similar
(Venkoba Rao, 2006a). So when we take the absolute differences of cumulative size
distributions of any two streams and normalize with regard to the maximum value, they
all collapse on to a single curve showing difference similarity and hence confirming that
the three distributions belong to the same classifier/separator. Table 1 depicts this
concept.

Table 1. Difference-similarity of cumulative finer distributions for Lynch et al. (1974)

data.

Inverse problem of classifier

An inverse problem is difficult to solve as there are infinite solutions. Among these
solutions, one of them is the correct solution and the question is to identify the correct
solution. For example, it is possible to get the classifier product size distributions given
feed size distribution and efficiency curve of the classifier. But reverse is an inverse
problem (in the absence of any information on the flow split of solid particles). In other
words, given overflow and underflow size distributions, question is to identify feed and
efficiency curve of the classifier.

Suppose, we derive mathematical relations between feed, overflow, underflow and

efficiency curve, the problem can be addressed. Assuming feed distribution in terms of
Gates-Gaudin-Schumann function and efficiency curve in terms of Plitt efficiency curve
or in terms of logistic function, the problem has been solved (Venkoba Rao, 2007a;
Venkoba Rao, 2007b). Figure 1 gives the feed identified from the product size
distributions in the absence of any information on the solid flow split for four sets of data
that are taken from literature.
Figure 1. Identification of feed distribution from its product distributions using inverse
model.

A generic partition surface of gravity concentrators

Separation of particles in gravity concentrators depends both on the size and density,
although they are studied with respect to density alone. In both classifiers and gravity
separators both size and density play an important role in particle separation. Considering
both size and density effects, we can represent the split of the feed to product streams in
terms of partition surface instead of partition curve. This partition surface can be
represented by the following equation (Venkoba Rao et al, 2003) with four parameters
that have physical significance to the separation.

1
Y 
2
 
1  erf Ad c    p   B  (1)

where A, B, c and  P are the parameters of size-density partition surface. The following
figure shows a typical partition surface showing both positive and reverse classification
of particles.
Figure 2. General representation of partition surface (After Ferrara and Schena, 1987)

Particle species segregation in a Jig bed

King (2001) and Taveres and King (1995) presented a phenomenological stratification
model for bed forming gravity concentrators, namely pinched sluice, the Richert cone and
the jig. The model will reveal how monosize feed particles distributed in density will
stratify according to density in the gravity concentrator. The model formulation is based
on the principle of stratification of particles under the influence of potential energy
gradient that are opposed by dispersive effects arising from particle-particle and particle-
fluid interactions within the bed. For the prevailing operating conditions of the
equipment, a dynamic state of equilibrium within the bed of particles is established
wherein the stratification flux for each particle type is exactly balanced by the
corresponding diffusive flux. Under this flux balance, the species concentration profile
along the normalized bed height, C j (h) for monosize particles of desnsity  j is obtained
by solving the system of differential equations:

dC j ( h)
  C j (h)(  j   (h )) for j  1,2,...m. (2)
dh

where  is specific stratification constant which quantifies the degree of bed

stratification and  (h) is the average density profile along the stratified bed height. As
no boundary conditions for Eq. (2) either at the top or bottom of the stratified bed can be
specified a priori, the system of equations defined by Eq. (2) are solved by a numerical
technique subjected to the conditions
 m
 ( h)   C j ( h)  j (3)
j 1
m

C
j 1
j (h )  1 for all h (4)
1
C jf   C j ( h)dh for all j (5)
0

where C jf is the feed density distribution by volume.

After obtaining the solution, the mass yield of solids to the float stream by slicing the bed
at a relative height hs is given by

  (h)dh
hs
 ( hs )  1
(6)
  (h)dh
0

The recovery of density component  j to the float stream by slicing the bed at a relative
height hs is given by

C
hs
j (h) dh
R j ( hs )  (7)
C jf

Equations (2)-(7) hold well in case of a batch process. With consideration of longitudinal
transport of particles in continuous operation, the model can be extended to continuous
operations as well. Figure 1 shows typical average bed density of the stratified bed for
batch as well as continuous operations for the same feed with relative height being zero at
the bottom of the bed. More pronounced stratification occurs in continuous operation
than the batch process.

The model has been extended to consider size effects in stratification and more details of
this are presented in Venkoba Rao (2007c). Typical size-density partition surfaces at
various cut height as seen by the model are presented in Figure 3. The model envisages
that only coarse particles segregate in the bed and fine particles are well dispersed within
the bed despite density differences among the particles. Figure 4 shows a typical species
concentration profile of how the particles of each size-density species segregate in a jig
bed.
 h=0.2
h=0.4
1.0
1.0
ent

ent
0.8
0.8
Partition Coeffici

Partition Coeffici
0.6 0.6

0.4 0.4
2000

3
2000

/m 3
0.2 0.2

g/m
1800 1800

kg
k
0.0 1600

y,
0.0 1600

,
ity
it
4

ns

ns
1400 4
8 1400

de
8

de
Partic 12
le siz Partic 12
cle

le
e, mm 16 le size, 16

rtic
rti
mm
Pa

Pa
h=0.6

1.0
1.0
ent

ent

0.8
Partition Coeffici

0.8
Partition Coeffici

0.6
0.6
h=0.8
0.4 0.4
3

2000
g/m

2000

/m 3
0.2 0.2
k

1800 1800
y,

kg
it

0.0 1600 0.0 1600

ns

y,
sit
de

4 4 1400

n
8 1400 8
cle

de
12 Partic 12
rti

Partic

le
16 le siz 16
Pa

le siz
rtic
e , mm e, m m Pa

Figure 3. Partition surfaces calculated from simulations of stratification model for the
batch operation.
 0.4 0.035
C 51(h) C66(h)
C15(h)

Species Concentration, Cij(h)

Speicies Concentration, Cij(h)

0.030
0.3 0.025 C52(h)
C21(h)
0.020 C62(h)
0.2 C61(h)
0.015
C16(h) C41(h) C42(h)
C14(h)
C26(h) 0.010
0.1 C11(h)
C 36(h) C25(h)
C46(h)
C31(h)
0.005
C56(h)
0.0 0.000
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
Relative height in stratified bed Relative height in stratified bed

0.016 0.007
Species Concentration, Cij(h)

0.014
Species Concentration, Cij(h)

0.006 C64(h)
C53(h) C65(h)
0.012
0.005
C63(h) C12(h)
0.010
0.004 C32(h)
0.008
C54(h)
0.003
0.006 C55(h) C44(h)
C43(h) 0.002
0.004 C24(h) C33(h) C22(h)
C13(h)
0.002 0.001
C35(h) C45(h) C23(h) C 34(h)
0.000 0.000
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
Relative height in stratified bed Relative height in stratified bed

Figure 4. Species concentration profiles in a batch-operated separator for the Llewellyn et

al (1979) bivariate feed distribution data. There are 36 species in total and total area
under all these curves adds to1.

Self-similarity in fine grinding and its applicability

Typically, a continuous-size continuous-time population balance model of size reduction

in a batch process over the entire particle distribution is described by the following
integro-differential equation.


m( x, t )  B( x, v) 
 k ( x, t ) m( x, t )   k (v, t )  m(v, t )dv (8)
t x  x 

Where m(x, t) is the weight fraction of particles in the size range x to x+dx at grind time t.
The two major parameters of the model are –
1. Breakage rate function, k(x,t) which is the rate of breakage of particles of size x at
grind time t.
2. Cumulative breakage distribution function, B(x,ν) which describes the fraction of
 particles of size x and finer formed when a unit mass of particles of size v are
broken, where v > x.

Kapur (1972) showed that for the following functional form of the grinding parameters

k ( x)  Ax a (9)

and

b
 x  x
B ( x, v)  B      (10)
v v

Eq. (8) exhibits a similarity solution. It is possible to derive the cumulative passing
particle size distribution evolution in terms of regularized gamma function (Venkoba Rao
and Amlan Datta, 2006b) given by-

 b  x  a   ((b  1) / a )  a 
  ,     
 a  u1 (t )    (b / a )  
F ( x, t )    (11)
 (b / a )

Where the mean size of the distribution at time, t, i.e., u1(t) is given by-

1
u1 (t )  1 /( a  c )
(12)
  c   (b / a)  a 
 A1    t
  a   ((b  1) / a )  
 

In deriving Eq. (11), a non-linear breakage rate function has been considered of the form

k ( x, t )  Ax a u1 (t ) c (13)

The four parameters, namely A, a, b and c, which can be estimated from a given set of
experimental data through optimization routines by minimizing the sum of squares of
errors between model and experimental values. Here c is a constant that accounts for
acceleration (c>0), deceleration (c<0) or time-invariance (c=0) of breakage rate.
Figure 5. Experimental and simulated size distributions for limestone fine grinding in
stirred mills at various energy inputs. Quick attainment of self-similarity of these
distributions in stirred mills is shown in the lower part.

Conclusions

Mathematical modeling has emerged as an important tool for plant assessment and
improvement. There are models that are very simple to those that are very complex.
Fundamental models based on physical laws and sound assumptions are more practically
useful than the empirical ones. An integrated model of the unit operations across the
circuit is very useful in displaying the interactive nature of the circuit and thus will be
helpful in the control of the circuit and maintaining targeted grad-recovery and thus
enhancing plant productivity and profitability. In this paper we have looked at some of
the applications of mathematical modeling to mineral industry.

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