Study on Mineral Blending Models for Poly-metallic Open-pit Mine

摘要

According to mineral blending problem of poly-metallic deposits, this paper addresses a single-objective blending model and a multi-objective blending model separately. An open-pit copper-molybdenum mine was chosen as an engineering background to demonstrate these two models. Then actual blending results of two models were analyzed comparatively. It is concluded that multi-objective mineral blending model is more suitable for practical production in poly-metallic deposits with more flexibility and accuracy. With the rapid economic development in China, the demand for minerals is increasing continually. However, geological reserves continue to be consumed with the increasing difficulty of reserve prospecting, causing China's mining enterprises to face severe problem of resources scarcity [ . Rationally mining low grade ore is an effective measure to cope with the present situation. Mining low grade ore should be backed up by many technical and economic approaches, including strengthening ore blending to ensure recovery of low grade ore, which is particularly important. The adjustment of withdrawing of high and low grade ore, which can effectively balance ore quality and reduce the cost of ore processing while stabling processing performance, can finally increase economic benefits and improve the capacity of risk resistance. The significance of the mineral blending is particularly important to poly-metallic deposits. Currently, mineral blending researches mostly concentrate on single metal deposits, but rarely on the condition of poly-metallic coexistence in both domestic and international researches. Unlike single metal, modeling and solving of the multi-metal problems are more complex, because of the fact that grade balance of each metal should be considered on objective function and the process of searching optimization is intricate. Therefore, poly-metallic mineral blending is a highly complicated nonlinear problem. In this paper, studies on mineral blending problem in poly-metallic deposits are involved, and the modeling and solving process is completed.