Innovation in Mineral processing plants; Filter press digitalization

With the advancement of technology, all equipment and industries are moving towards digitalization. Mining industry as an important and influential industry is also moving forward in the field of mining equipment and digitalization in order to improve functionality and also final outcome of the system.

Digital innovation is bringing a variety of benefits to mining and mineral processing. Nowadays higher production capacity, greater safety, higher efficiency, and lower operation costs in filtration processes can be achieved by a package of sensors and a computer.

Intelligent filter press features can cause enhanced safety and monitoring function. Intelligent filter press solutions offer a lot of benefits to plant operators.

Reaching defined cake moisture content as the main duty of a filter press can be the main benefit of implementation of digitalization and digital instrumentation in dewatering equipment. This is where the digital approaches and controlling system can help the mineral processing system.

In order to provide an opportunity to increase efficiency, smart Sensors can be used inside the filter press to monitor the pressure constantly and compares the values reported with the optimum values so the filter press can be stopped automatically if there are deviations from the delicate numbers. It also improves safety by stopping the filter press in case of pressure loss. The combination of findings gathered from Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) with automation solutions for the filter press, by creating new mechanisms and features, may lead to an increase in product quality and a decrease in operating costs as a result of process optimization.

The solid content in filtrate can be measured by optical sensors and also discharge filtrate volume can be controlled by vision sensords to optimize the performance of the process. In addition, having a sensor to calculate the chamber feed inlet volume is one of the most important advantages of implementation of digitalization in filtration process.

 

In addition, the oil levels and oil quality are measured constantly by automation, ensuring continuing smooth operation and reducing OPEX costs by avoiding unnecessary oil changes.

As a result, the key effects of digitalization in filter press can be summarized as below:

  • The improvement of washing cycles’ intelligence, which will result in automatic plate movement and cloth washing without the need for operator intervention.
  • The optimization and online control of process parameters such as temperature, dry content, throughput, pressure and pH level.
  • Creating innovation in the mechanism for shifting plates by using tilt sensors. In addition, optimized frames provided by finite element method.
  • Additional sensors can be used for pressure monitoring and also to support predictive maintenance such as oil and filtrate quality.