The Project
An Australian mining operation was facing challenges with forecasting downstream gold and silver production based on variable upstream ore composition. Their traditional forecasting methods required the site metallurgists to manually update legacy Excel sheets, which made it difficult to perform reliable mass balances and extend forecasts into the future. The plant needed a more reliable and repeatable way to forecast metal flows over time.
Technical Solutions
WGA developed a full-site mass balance model that predicts the deportment of five metals, Ag (Silver), Au (Gold), Bi (Bismuth), Sb (Antimony) and As (Arsenic), and reagent consumption across the plant. The model was delivered through an Excel interface, allowing site metallurgists to run forecasts, visualise metal flows and estimate reagent consumption. Metallurgists could view daily and monthly forecast plots as well as validation outputs to build confidence in the model’s accuracy.
The implemented model
- Decreased production uncertainty by creating a tool that reliably forecasts downstream gold and silver recovery from variable upstream ore.
- Provided metallurgists with a view of plant performance with a mass balance model that tracks valuable metals and impurities through the entire circuit.
- Made it easy for metallurgists to run the model, generate deportment plots and estimate reagent consumption and total production.
- Enabled bottleneck management by allowing metallurgists to predict how impurities would impact production, giving them time to mitigate negative effects.
- Built trust in the model by validating against five years of historical data, giving the client confidence in its accuracy for planning.
Client Focus
The tool allows on-site metallurgists to diagnose potential bottlenecks from impurity concentrations and take action to reduce their impact ahead of time. As a result, the client now has a reliable forecasting tool that enables better planning, and a deeper understanding of how upstream variability impacts downstream performance.
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