REAGENT DOSAGE CONTROL FOR THE ANTIMONY FLOTATION PROCESS BASED ON FROTH SIZE PDF TRACKING AND AN INDEX PREDICTIVE MODEL
The control of flotation processes has always been an important research subject. Many experts and scholars have carried out extensive research to avoid the problems encountered when operating in a manual mode. By combining long-term worker tracking experiments and observations of froth appearance characteristics in a gold-antimony flotation plant, a reagent dosage hybrid control strategy for the antimony flotation process is proposed in this work. This strategy consists of two parts: reagent dosage tracking control based on a froth size probability density function (PDF) and reagent dosage compensation control based on a distributed-machine vision predictive model. The proposed method was tested on a gold-antimony flotation process, and it improved tailings qualification rate to 96.67%, and reduced the tailings standard deviation. This method also efficiently accounts for the influence of disturbances on the flotation system and improves the stability and effectiveness of the flotation system.