Recovery
Mineral Processing
One of the most important and basic concepts in mineral processing is metallurgical efficiency. Two terms are used to describe this efficiency: recovery and grade.
Recovery
The recovery or percent recovery refers to the ratio of the valuable material (metal or mineral) contained in the concentrate with reference to the amount of the same material in the processing plant feed.
How and where?
The main place where the user input the recovery information is when defining the Economic Values.
However, as this information is implicit in the economic functions, the user need to input this value on the interface for purposes of generating reports.
On the Destination tab (light green), the user can define recoveries for each element in the panel (dark green) from Figure 1.
Figure 1: Destinations tab and recoveries.
Varying Recoveries
Why?
A detailed mine planning is likely to require an iterative process to update a block model with new information.
Considering the usage of specific tools for measurements, analysis, and reporting, mine planners might be interested in using the thorough information acquired on recoveries along the way.
How?
When editing the data set, the user can add as many columns as needed, defining recoveries for each block. Figure 2 shows how it would look like.
Figure 2: Recovery columns in the block model.
Figure 3: Imported recoveries available to the user.
Figure 3 shows a dropdown menu where the user can choose which recovery to use:
RecoveryA
RecoveryB
Constant recovery
NOTE the user does not need to use all the recovery fields imported for each run. This means recovery fields might be created for further scenarios, being used separately. The same concept is valid for columns with slopes and economic values.
Step-by-step
The following video presents how to use a different recovery for each block.
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