Operational optimization of copper flotation process based on the weighted Gaussian process regression and index-oriented adaptive differential evolution algorithm

Concentrate copper grade(CCG)is one of the important production indicators of copper flotation processes,and keeping the CCG at the set value is of great significance to the economic benefit of copper flotation industrial processes.This paper addresses the fluctuation problem of CCG through an operational optimization method.Firstly,a density-based affinity propagationalgorithm is proposed so that more ideal working condition categories can be obtained for the complex raw ore properties.Next,a Bayesian network(BN)is applied to explore the relationship between the operational variables and the CCG.Based on the analysis results of BN,a weighted Gaussian process regression model is constructed to predict the CCG that a higher prediction accuracy can be obtained.To ensure the predicted CCG is close to the set value with a smaller magnitude of the operation adjustments and a smaller uncertainty of the prediction results,an index-oriented adaptive differential evolution(IOADE)algorithm is proposed,and the convergence performance of IOADE is superior to the traditional differential evolution and adaptive differential evolution methods.Finally,the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed methods are verified by the experiments on a copper flotation industrial process.

Correlation Analysis of Control Parameters of Flotation Process

The dosage of gold-antimony flotation process of 5 main drugs,including Copper Sulfate,Lead Nitrate,Yellow Medicine,No.2 Oil,Black Medicine,with corresponding visual features of foam images,including Stability,Gray Scale,Mean R,Mean G,Mean B,Mean Average,Dimension and Degree Variance,were recorded.Parameter correlation analysis showed that the correlation among Copper Sulfate,Yellow Medicine,Black Medicine,as well as the correlation among Gray Scale,Mean R,Mean G,Mean B,is strong,and the correlation among Dimension,Gray Scale,Mean R,Mean G,Mean B,as well as the correlation between Stability and each dosing parameter,is week.It also indicated a feasible way to decrease the complexity of flotation control system by reducing some parameters.