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Froth flotation is a widely used method for the concentration of sulfide minerals. The structure of the superficial froth is an indicator of the performance of froth flotation alongside with the operational conditions in which this process is carried out. The aim of this study is to explore how the different operational conditions that can be managed in a flotation plant could directly influence the observable characteristics of the superficial froth. For this purpose, a froth image database was created using a special laboratory cell, designed to emulate the conditions seen in an industrial flotation cell. The database contains 2250 images, distributed in 45 categories; each category has a specific combination of testing conditions, and the main visual characteristics are observed. It also includes a methodology used to assess the quality of each corresponding category. Dataset: doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21437292 Dataset License: CC BY 4.0 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Geometallurgical modeling applied to mineral processing plants and tailings facilities performance. • Water consumption in mineral processing is assessed using simulation. • Integration of meteorological variables in estimating water consumption in mineral processing. • Water consumption as part of the mine planning process. Water is essential in mineral processing. Because water is a limited resource and many mining operations are located in water-scarce areas, proper water management is crucial. An alternative to facing water scarcity in mining is its reuse in the process. Water recirculation is limited because there are water losses associated with the plant operation and the tailings facility. Tailings composition and particle size affect the losses related to entrainment and rewetting. These parameters can be estimated by simulating the plant using geometallurgical models. Weather variables such as radiation, temperature, wind speed, and the fraction of possible sunshine, impact the evaporation expected in the tailings facility. The variability of weather conditions throughout the year implies that evaporation depends on the season. This information is used to assess the water balance in a tailings facility located in a specific region, estimating the water consumption for a given operation. Water consumption can be economically valued and included in the mine plan. This methodology is used to provide examples where a mine plan is optimized incorporating water consumption and using efficient water management criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water and energy are essential requirements for mineral processing plants, and they can be either scarce or expensive. In the present paper, the implications of a remote water source location (typically the seashore) are analyzed in terms of a definition for the combined water and energy operational cost required to transport ore concentrate using long distance pipelines. A typical process route is defined to expose the relevance of key process variables, including source remoteness and water reclamation both from tailing storage facilities and thickeners. Both mass and energy balances have been made to give an estimation of specific energy consumptions for a typical large scale Chilean mineral processing operations, considering a number of realistic hydraulic design criteria to make a comparative analysis of different plant processing capacities. In the present cost function definition, an account has been made on whether the water is either makeup or has been recirculated on the plant, and a distinction has been made on whether tailings are conventional or thickened, which allowed to analyze the relevance of in-plant water recovery compared to water recovery from the tailing disposal site. This has allowed to express the cost of water in terms of the various energy cost terms, thus showing in this case that the cost of water is ultimately the cost of energy, and therefore all cost components become proportional to the unit cost of energy. A piecewise constant pipeline diameter analysis scheme has been defined to allow studying the implications of water recovery on widely different plant sizes. Results show that for fixed water recovery rates, increasing plant throughput tends to cause a decrease on the specific energy for water transport. On the other hand, for fixed pipeline diameters, increasing the throughput causes an increase on the specific energy consumption, but such increase rate becomes milder at higher throughput rates. This suggests the advantage of the existence of common makeup water supply systems for mining districts with more than one mineral processing plant. On the other hand, for constant pipeline diameters, increasing the water recovery from the tailing disposal site or from thickeners generates a decrease of water specific energy consumption, where in the case of the water recovery from the tailing disposal site such decrease rate becomes stronger with the amount of water recovered. Results also shows that, except for very high solid concentrations, water makeup costs dominate over recirculation ones, supporting that producing thickened tailings is a more efficient option than conventional ones in the sense of specific energy consumption, in spite of the additional energy costs due to slurry transport that this option implies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Geometallurgical modeling applied to mineral processing plant performance. • Ore blending in mineral processing plant is assessed using simulation. • Residence time distributions assessment for different plant configurations. Mineral processing plant performance depends on multiple factors, including the feed and the parameters to control the process. In this work, we show how to assess plant performance using geometallurgical modeling and dynamic simulation. Several models that describe comminution, classification, flotation, and residence time distribution (RTD) are implemented as modules and then connected to represent generic plant configurations. The estimation of the RTD is used to assess the ore blending generated within the plant through a methodology based on weighting the ore contribution at the plant discharge. Additionally, the RTD is used to display the ore permanence at different plant stages, which can be used as an operational input to anticipate the consequences of a perturbation in the feed. Different simulation scenarios are tested using synthetic data, including different plant configurations, time support for blending assessment, and ore feeding sequence. The results show that the simulation is sensitive to these attributes. Significant differences are detected in the generated product compositions when the plant configuration is changed. Also, distinct mine plans can be evaluated through simulation, predicting their processing performance. Therefore, the simulation tool developed can be used to evaluate real mineral processing operations and to test different operative strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the counting and measuring of overlapping circular objects in binary images, a problem that arises in the mineral processing industry when estimating the distribution of bubble diameters in flotation cells in order to predict the geometallurgical performance of the flotation process. By viewing the images as realizations of a stationary planar Boolean model with circular grains and by using two-point set statistics, it is possible to jointly estimate the average number of objects per unit area and their diameter distribution. When applied to real and simulated images, this method is shown to give accurate estimates, to be robust to the presence of noise contaminating the images and of moderate drifts in the number of objects per unit area, and to speed up the processing time with respect to currently used methods. Combined, these properties serve to make the method suitable for an on-line monitoring of the flotation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]