PROCESS SYSTEMS IN THE METALLURGICAL INDUSTRIES 05
Sponsored by Limn: The Flowsheet Processor

Background

In order to survive in the competitive world of the 21st century, the metallurgical industries have to design and operate processes effectively and efficiently. Continued globalization of trade and commerce is expected to lead to lower margins, in tandem with increased environmental pressures, more stringent safety regulations, increased investor demand for improved earnings of both commodity and specialty products, as well as flexible manufacturing to customer specification within a tight schedule. This requires a better understanding and development of systematic procedures for planning, design and operation of the relevant process systems – in short, the basic aims of the relatively young area of process systems engineering.

Although a range of powerful tools and techniques are now in daily use in the process engineering community, the process industries are still faced with many intractable problems. This includes the challenge faced by process engineering to extract the maximum benefit from new technology, while working closely with the informatics community, but without losing their skills as metallurgical engineers.

While largely driven by industrial needs, advances in process systems engineering are intimately connected with the rapid advances in informatics and computer technology and this conference served as a forum for discussion of the most recent innovations in the technology, covering theory and applications in equal measure.

Themes

The conference covered the entire field of mining, mineral processing and ferrous and non-ferrous extractive metallurgy with themes including:

• Recent Developments in Modelling and Simulation
• Process Analysis and Control
• From Process Data to Plant Automation
• Data Reconciliation and Gross Error Detection
• Smart Sensors, Metallurgical Accounting and Laboratory Automation
• Diagnostic Monitoring and Fault Detection in Process Systems
• Intelligent Process Systems
• Continuous Process Improvement Strategies
• Process Synthesis and Design

Organizers

The conference was organized by Minerals Engineering International (MEI) in consultation with Chris Aldrich from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. Professor Aldrich has authored or co-authored a wide range of papers on various topics in process systems engineering and is among other the author of Exploratory Analysis of Metallurgical Process Data with Neural Networks and Related Methods by Elsevier Science, B.V.

Chris Aldrich