The plant had challenges in three key areas. The first was instrumentation – some of which was unverified or had material build-up. There was also no flowmeter or density meter instrumentation at critical points. Another issue was sampling, which was overly manual, and infrequent. Data management was also a challenge. Important data was stored in spreadsheets, there was no robust change management, and the timing of reconciliations was somewhat ad-hoc.
The plant provided Metallurgical Systems with instrumentation and lab data for a six-month period. Among other things, it was confirmed that the plant’s mill feed weightometers were over-reading by 20%, and the flash flotation flowmeter was also over-reading by 30%. The plant was able to make improvements and upgrades to the weightometer frame to address this.
Armed with the framework of recommendations from Metallurgical Systems, the client has been able to make progress and identify reconciliation issues that were significantly impacting the plant’s profitability. Most importantly, the plant has been able to close the gap between its ‘calculated’ and ‘actual’ measurements.