Material Fingerprinting: Understanding how differences in geology impact metallurgical plant performance

To extract raw materials responsibly and sustainably, the minerals industry has to continuously optimise the mine-to-metal process and requires an entirely different valuation model. Currently, most operational decisions (e.g., ore-waste boundaries, short-term scheduling, blending policies, dispatch decisions) are evaluated using a revenue-based model. Such a model derives the value of the material from its estimated metal content (grade ⇥ tonnage). However, metallurgical attributes which largely define the processing costs (revenue losses) are left out of the equation since they are either missing or unreliable. In a future optimisation step, it should be possible to offset the anticipated revenue against an aggregated metallurgical cost based on, for example, energy consumption, throughput, recovery and reagent consumption. This drives the need for an improved method to describe the to-be-processed material, which determines the influence of geological behaviour (the material type) on the processing performance (associated with the costs)....