General concepts

General Concepts

Each grinding calculation consist of several components that interact with each other:

• A 'Testwork' database containing the laboratory results and optional geological information that describes the samples taken for testing.
• A 'folder' that contains the programming to convert testwork into 'queries'. The folder you choose to use will be determined by which specific energy consumption model you want to run.
• A 'circuit' which acts as a container for two model components:
  • A 'specific energy model' that estimates how much energy is required to grind ore from a feed size to a product size.
  • One or more 'mill power draw models' that estimates how much power is evolved by a mill of a particular geometry under specified operating conditions.

Different 'circuit' configurations can be run against the 'query' result. For example, two different circuits can have different sized mills. Different variations on the 'specific energy model' can test different product sizes or types of circuit configurations.

Clients with a large amount of data covering a variety of different orebodies (head office or consultant licenses) have an extra component:

• A 'project' to which each item of 'testwork' and each 'circuit' is assigned to a particular project. This effectively partitions a much larger database into a manageable mine-specific data set.

Intellectual Property

The grinding circuit models on SAGMILLING.COM consist of programming and data partitioned into two areas:

• Your client area, which contains:
  • Your private database which contains the testwork database, the circuits you have run in your private area along with the output (collectively, the "database").
  • (optionally) Any private mill power draw model or specific energy consumption model ("models")
  • (optionally) Any query folder that was programmed specifically for your private area ("folders").
  • (optionally) A specific branding assigned to your model, would re-format the output of the basic user interface to apply your company's specific branding (in programming terms, the "theme").
• The pubic area base models and user interface that are available to all clients.

The items in your client area are only accessible by people to whom you account administrator has assigned an ID and password combination. Programmers at SAGMILLING.COM generally have maintenance access to models and databases, for example, to make database backups and to confirm that the models are operating correctly. The privacy of your data is important, and SAGMILLING.COM promises to not access your data for reasons other than maintenance and to make sure the programming is working properly.