Resumen

TOLOSANA-DELGADO, R. et al. Improving processing by adaption to conditional geostatistical simulation of block compositions. J. S. Afr. Inst. Min. Metall. [online]. 2015, vol.115, n.1, pp.13-26. ISSN 2411-9717.

Exploitation of an ore deposit can be optimized by adapting the beneficiation processes to the properties of individual ore blocks. This can involve switching in and out certain treatment steps, or setting their controlling parameters. Optimizing this set of decisions requires the full conditional distribution of all relevant physical parameters and chemical attributes of the feed, including concentration of value elements and abundance of penalty elements. As a first step towards adaptive processing, the mapping of adaptive decisions is explored based on the composition, in value and penalty elements, of the selective mining units. Conditional distributions at block support are derived from cokriging and geostatistical simulation of log-ratios. A one-to-one log-ratio transformation is applied to the data, followed by modelling via classical multivariate geostatistical tools, and subsequent back-transforming of predictions and simulations. Back-transformed point-support simulations can then be averaged to obtain block averages that are fed into the process chain model. The approach is illustrated with a 'toy' example where a four-component system (a value element, two penalty elements, and some liberable material) is beneficiated through a chain of technical processes. The results show that a gain function based on full distributions outperforms the more traditional approach of using unbiased estimates.

Palabras clave : adaptive processing; change of suppport; compositions; geometallurgy; stochastic optimization.

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