REDUNDANCY ANALYSIS OF COMPLEX SETS OF MINERAL PROCESSING DATA FOR MASS BALANCE COMPUTATION

The study deals with the analysis of the feasibility of mass balance calculations for complex set of mineral processing data involving the measurement of flowrates, slurry dilution, liquid composition, solid composition, particle size distribution, assays within particle size classes etc... A method is presented for determining the unmeasurable variables which are calculable, and the measured variables which are redundant i.e. adjustable by any least squares procedure. The approach, which is called redundancy analysis, is based on the linearization of the system of mass conservation equations and on its decomposition in a row-echelon form. A global and a hierarchical procedures are proposed and illustrated on a simple mineral processing flowsheet for which a complex set of data is available.