In March this year a Botswana copper mine chose South African-based scada and solution provider, Adroit Technologies to implement a scada control system on its new Greenfield plant.
The control system was implemented on the primary, secondary and tertiary crushing plants to optimise the copper extraction process. The flotation process is monitored using standard flotation process technology and has been designed to produce saleable copper concentrates from the treatment of approximately 1 million tonnes of oxide, supergene and sulphide ores, per annum.
The process plant has two floatation circuits. Sulphide minerals are separated first, and tailings from the sulphide roughers are sent to an oxide circuit. Most other mineral species are recovered in the oxide flotation process. Concentrates are filtered to recover excess process water, as are tailings. Tailings will be dry stacked. Water recovered in the dewatering stages will be recycled to the various parts of the plant as process water. The final product is then packaged and distributed to smelters.
Tailored system design
The scada control system was custom designed for this plant specifically, ensuring that the demands and objectives of the mine were met. Adroit made good use of the opportunity to ensure that best use was made of current technology.
The Botswana team chose the South African-based scada provider because of its previous successes with other similar projects. The team believed that the technology implemented was user friendly and Adroit software offered more potential for the new plant than the competing solutions. The ability of Adroit software to communicate with the network switches and the PLCs was a significant consideration. Every scada mimic is set up to display the communication and transaction time of each PLC – and to indicate whether the communication with these devices is healthy. Another prerequisite was to ensure 24/7 uptime – and a fast transition time, should a hardware failure occur.
Satisfaction with system performance
The transition times provided by the Adroit Active Cluster technology were considered excellent. The system has proven to be reliable and has withstood rigorous testing. Where reports were previously manually generated, the operators now make use of the trending and visual indicators to easily determine the health of the plant.
Rapid implementation
The implementation phase was brief and effective, as the operators and the adroit team used the trending reports to make the necessary adjustments to ensure the optimal running of the plant. The customisation of the plants specification were given to Adroit before commissioning to ensure that little time would be spent in making adjustments.
For more information contact Paul Geng, Adroit Technologies, +27 (0)11 658 8100, www.adroit.co.za
| Tel: | +27 11 658 8100 |
| Fax: | +27 11 658 8101 |
| Email: | [email protected] |
| www: | www.adroit.co.za |
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