Solution strategies to the stochastic design of mineral flotation plants
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Vielma_Solution-strategies.pdf
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688.31 KB
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Author(s)
Jamett, Nathalie
Cisternas, Luis A.
Vielma Centeno, Juan Pablo
Date Issued
June 2015
Journal
Chemical Engineering Science
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
Jamett, Nathalie et al. “Solution Strategies to the Stochastic Design of Mineral Flotation Plants.” Chemical Engineering Science 134 (September 2015): 850–860 © 2015 Elsevier Ltd
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
The aim of this study is two-fold: first, to analyze the effect of stochastic uncertainty in the design of flotation circuits and second, to analyze different strategies for the solution of a two-stage stochastic problem applied to a copper flotation circuit. The paper begins by introducing a stochastic optimization problem whose aim is to find the best configuration of superstructure, equipment design and operational conditions, such as residence time and stream flows. Variability is considered in the copper price and ore grade. This variability is represented by scenarios with their respective probability of occurrence. The resulting optimization problem is a two-stage stochastic mixed integer nonlinear program (TS-MINLP), which can be extremely challenging to solve. For this reason, several solvers for this problem are compared and two stochastic programming methodologies are applied. The combination of these techniques allows the production of high quality solutions and an analysis of their sensitivity to epistemic uncertainty. The results show that the stochastic problem gives better designs because it allows operational parameters to adapt to the uncertainty of the parameters. The results also show that the flotation circuit structure can vary with the feed grade and copper price. The sensitivity analysis shows small to moderate variability with epistemically uncertain parameters.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ces.2015.06.010
