Trabajo ganador del área de Investigación y Tecnología del Foro TIS que obtuvo el Premio Nacional de Minería de PERUMIN 36.

Por: Jorge García y Yoshiro Travezaño, Anglo American Quellaveco. 

Abstract

Anglo American's Quellaveco mine is located in Peru, approximately 50 km east of Moquegua, 236 km southeast of Arequipa and 1,200 km southeast of Lima. 

The Papujune concentrator plant has a processing capacity of 127,500 tons of ore through primary crushing, grinding, a collective copper-molybdenum (Cu-Mo) flotation process and a selective molybdenum flotation process. 

The Cu-Mo flotation process consists of a rougher flotation circuit followed by two sequential cleaning stages and will produce a combined Cu-Mo concentrate. The rougher tailings produced in the collective Cu-Mo flotation process contain valuable copper minerals within the size of coarser fractions that would be lost in the final plant waste (tailings). 

Conventional flotation will capture particles up to 150 µm, while a significant fraction of the valuable sulfides is contained in rougher tailings with a size greater than 150 µm. 

The coarse particle flotation (CPF) plant will collect these coarser sulfide particles normally lost in the tailings stream. CPF is a technology designed to recover non-released valuable minerals contained in coarser volumes with valuable mineral surface area in particle sizes as high as 500 to 700 µm. 

This third plant is being built to integrate with Anglo American's digital mine model with the most sophisticated technology, incorporating its operation from the integrated control center, building its digital twin, and with industrial applications for process control and automation, running on network and server technology typical of a world-class operation. 

The challenge is to achieve an efficient and predictive operation where the technology systems on which the CPF plant depends must not fail. Faced with this challenge, new engineering profiles have been trained to support the first digital mine in Peru, as well as a service model agreed with the operation to ensure the continuity of the systems and, therefore, of production.