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.