Fecha de publicación: 01/01/2025 Fuente: Materials Abstract
The integrated management of smelter operations is founded on standard operating practices, including standardized operating modes. The system-wide conception of modes ensures that if new instructions are to be sent to one part of the smelter, e.g. the smelting furnace, then corresponding sets of instructions are sent to the other critical parts of the smelter, e.g. the offgas handling system. In general, a mode change is triggered when the risk-opportunity profile of the plant has deviated to the extent that a system-wide response is merited, passing a critical threshold. These theoretical notions had been initially been discussed in Automated Scheduling and Scientific Management of Copper Smelters (Navarra, Miner Process Ext Metall 125(1):39–44, 2016) but gained practicality through a collaboration with the Hernan Videla Lira (HVL) Smelter, described in System Dynamics and Discrete Event Simulation of Copper Smelters (Navarra et al., Min Metall Explor 34(2):96–106, 2017). The current paper now recounts the formative experiences surrounding the work at HVL, which led to data-driven framework that considered changing meteorological conditions within the Atacama region, quantifying the trade-off between the environmental risk of SO2 accumulation, and copper production. The same approach could be adapted to other metallurgical operations, to develop integrated responses to dynamically changing risk-opportunity profiles.