Abstract
Mineral processing facilities commonly have storage bins for temporary housing of the ore supplied to their processing lines. Facilities with large rectangular bins usually have a tripper machine to load and spread the ore along the entire extension of the bin, by means of forth-and-back traveling movements. The positioning control of a tripper is a relevant yet less concerned control problems, with significant impact on the productivity of mineral processing facilities, for which a poor controlled tripper is a common source of bottleneck. This work concerns the development and implementation of a strategy for autonomous position determination for a tripper in a large iron ore processing facility, with the ultimate goal of eliminating the need for a local operator to decide the tripper positioning under manual operation. Such “autonomous positioning advisor” acts as an expert system to determine the “best” position (bin cell) where the tripper should be placed to feed the bin in order to meet some operational requirements as: (1) to make the ore level more uniform across the bin; (2) to prevent excessive and unnecessary travels of the tripper; and (3) to suppress the ore discharge from the tripper to the bin when the tripper needs to travel over a fully filled cells to reach the destination cell. The positioning control strategy was based on operational knowledge and procedures used by the tripper operators when operating the tripper in manual mode. The results obtained with the autonomous positioning advisor allowed the tripper to operate consistently in automatic mode and showed improved operational performance.
Highlights
THE Carajás Iron Ore Processing Plant I, from VALE, is the biggest mineral processing plant in the world
The black line is the operating mode of the tripper (0 = Manual, 1 = Automatic); the red curve is the average level of ore in the bin; and the blue line indicates the cell over which the tripper was along the time
The tripper operation in automatic mode was successfully achieved with the autonomous positioning system developed in this work
Summary
THE Carajás Iron Ore Processing Plant I, from VALE, is the biggest mineral processing plant in the world. Storage bins are a basic component of some facilities They intend to temporarily store the bulk ore before it is sent to the mineral processing lines, as well as to act as “material backup” structures, preventing the production of its facility from ceasing due to production stoppages in the upstream facility which supplies ore to the bin. Those bins are large structures with a tripper machine at its top, to spread the ore inside along the bin
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
