Abstract
The recent increase in global demand for the essential minerals/metals that support the production of alternative green energy sources raises serious concerns about the development and deployment of energy-efficient technologies in mining operations to reduce carbon footprint and meet climate change mitigation objectives. Given the urgency of relieving carbon footprint, this paper describes the main benefits of incorporating unique Advanced Process Control (APC) technology to optimize nickel reduction kiln operations which leads to a significant decrease in carbon emissions.
ANDRITZ`s Advanced Control Expert (ACE) APC strategy uses a hierarchical structure consisting of two layers of control technology. The base layer stabilizes the key process variables using a proprietary Multivariable Model Predictive Control (MPC) tool, commercially known as BrainWave®. The top layer performs as the supervisor, which is a rule-based algorithm for automatic management and optimization of process objectives.
ANDRITZ’s APC solution has been deployed on various mineral processing applications globally. This work presents an overview of the strategy and results obtained for a recent application on nickel reduction kilns in Asia. The technology fulfils the performance conditions essential to attain optimized operation, aligned with the effort of lowering greenhouse gas emissions. The performance results show a reduction in fossil fuel consumption of 4% to 7%, a throughput increase of 2% to 4%, and a significant decrease in operator workload and human interventions. The control performance assessment also shows a variability reduction of 40% to 50% in the temperature profile which improves the nickel product quality.