The approach in Operational Mineralogy is to focus on generating mineralogical data that is useful for particular goals. This helps to identify when the process plant is underperforming, diagnose where that is occurring and whether the root cause can be attributed to an unexpected change in ore characteristics or an operational issue.
Operational Mineralogy provides a tool in increasing the efficiency of the Identify, Diagnose, Execute, Augment (I.D.E.A) cycle for continuous improvement. This can be built using daily mineralogical analysis to identify potential issues and provide direction for diagnosis of the problem, which can then be used in more targeted projects for more detailed diagnosis and development of solutions. Assessing mineralogical trends on daily composites can allow rapid development of a process baseline, from which any fluctuations can flag that there may be an issue.
The volume of data generated in an Operational Mineralogy program can rapidly become overwhelming. An iMin Solutions program is structured around three basic principles for use of data to allow decision makers at a mineral processing operation to more quickly arrive at useful decisions that add value to the operation:
The information generated in an Operational Mineralogy program will provide an operation with the tools to react faster to process issues. As the volume of data increases and long term trends can be established this reactive approach can be extended to evaluate the mining plan and algorithms generated to predict the performance of material before it is fed to the processing circuit.