Application of Automatic Mass Balance in Metal Accounting of Iron Ore Plant

The purpose of this work is to present state of the art mass balances closing strategies in ore treatment plants to report metal accounting in a reliable manner. The current methodology is based on usage of an expert system which seizes and filters the plant data, analyses situations of equipment stops and mostly instruments failures. It is still possible to internally create a strategy to check the data of an instrument failure. The system is coupled to software with a Lagrangian model of mass balance closure that receives the pre-treated data. Thus, the data goes through filtering and reconciling processes to generate a reliable mass balance of the ore treatment plant. This made it possible to obtain a system that is able to tell the real productivity of an ore plant through reliable mass balances. Residence times on equipment are critical to the balance, thus, they require good logic to eliminate errors due to the characteristics of non-steady state. Among the next challenges is the inclusion of a soft sensor as a replacement of an instrument required for mass balance closure.