Data reconciliation and equilibrium constant estimation: Application to copper solvent extraction

Data reconciliation is a proven technique to filter out measurement errors, estimate unmeasured process variables, and improve the reliability of calculated performance indices. Although data reconciliation techniques are well accepted in mineral processing, applications to hydrometallurgy processes are not commonly encountered in the literature. This paper shows that data reconciliation can advantageously be applied to measurements from batch copper solvent extraction tests to improve the estimation of the extraction chemical equilibrium constant of the process.