Flotation Process Fault Diagnosis Via Structural Analysis

Abstract

International audienceFor the improvement of safety and efficiency, fault diagnosis becomes increasingly important in mining industry. The expansion of flotation processes with high-tonnage cooper concentrators demands the use of large flotation circuits in which the large amount of instrumentation and interconnected subsystems (with coupled measured and non-measured variables) makes this process complex. Moreover, in a flotation process, any equipment failure can lead to a fault condition, which will affect the operation of this process. This paper proposes an approach for on-line fault diagnosis useful for a large flotation circuit based on a distributed architecture. In this approach, structural analysis is used for the design of the distributed fault diagnosis system. Finally, a procedure for the implementation of local diagnosers for on-line operation is presented and illustrated with an application to a flotation process