Authors: D. Harron and J. Rosas
Procemin 2008 Conference, Santiago, Chile, October 22-24, 2008
Abstract
Once upon a time… that’s the typical beginning of a traditional fairy tale. And like the old fairy tales, once upon a time building a mineral processing plant was a very different enterprise than it is today. The owner of a property could go out and find a technically competent engineering company, explain what he wanted, wander away and in a few years find himself with a plant. That plant was built pretty much like all the others of its type and produced a product to be sold on the market. It wasn’t really important how many people it took to run it, how much energy it took, how much cheap and available water it used, how its waste was disposed of, all within some broad limits, of course.
Nowadays all of that has changed; not just some, ALL of it. Equipment, construction, labor, energy, water, consumables, fuel, every single thing that affects a mineral processing plant from design to operation, from rock to finished product, has risen dramatically in cost. Coupled with that are the restrictions imposed by governments at all levels, special interest groups and the industry itself, covering such things as health and safety, the environment, the local community and product quality.
The technology we use has advanced in giant steps over the last 25 years or so. We used to calculate everything by hand, and the simplest way to save time and be sure that something worked was to do it the way it had been done before. Now cutting edge software makes it possible to simulate any possible design permutation with a reasonable chance that it will work in the real world. Revolutionary new, or revamped old equipment technology impacts the process design possibilities.
What does all of this mean to the process industry and especially to the engineering services supporting it?
The reality is that not only are the tools we use different, but the way we work overall has totally changed. Much more than ever before, the design and layout of mineral process plants has become a delicate balancing of huge volumes of information with modern equipment technology and all of the restrictions placed on the industry. Creativity and innovation are required in evaluating and analyzing all of the information, rules, regulations, theories, opinions, needs and wants. This means that successful process plant design is far more than the application of technology, it relies on artistic creativity, particularly during the conceptual phases.
