Predictive control of reagent-addition amount based on PDF model of bubble size in copper roughing flotation process

Considering that froth flotation is an extremely complex physical and chemical process, it is difficult to establish an effective mechanism model, and the automatic control of the reagent-addition amount is difficult to be achieved in the lack of direct evaluation criterion as the reference, so currently the reagent dosage is still mainly controlled by manually observing the froth status, which leads to large reagent consumption and unstable flotation operation condition. In order to optimize the reagent-addition operation in the flotation process, make the flotation state stable and achieve the optimal reagent-addition control, a reagent dosage predictive control method was proposed based on probability density function(PDF) of bubble size. In this method, the PDF model of bubble size was established. Taking the flotation bubble size distribution as the control objective, the generalized predictive control algorithm was used to approach the target bubble size PDF so as to achieve the optimal reagent dosage control. The experimental results show that the generalized predictive control algorithm can well track the probability density function of the bubble size, which can consequently achieve the automatic control of the reagent-addition amount.