P80
The particle size that 80 percent of the ground product passes. The liberation-size target Grindex holds; too coarse under-liberates, too fine burns power.
Resources
The vocabulary of the concentrator, and what a pilot needs.
A glossary of the process terms Orebex's agents work with, the standards the reasoning layer cites, and the inputs a plant brings to a pilot baseline. No white papers or calculators are published yet; this page is the reference we actually have.
Standards the reasoning layer cites
- ISO standards referenced in the site's quality and environmental procedures
- ICMM principles and guidance
- Tailings and water governance documents the site operates under
- Your reagent schemes, flowsheet and geometallurgy specifications and recovery procedures
Retrieval is tenant-isolated and every answer carries its citation. Citing a standard is not a certification claim.
Glossary
Twelve terms
The process terms that appear throughout the site.
Liberation
Freeing valuable mineral grains from the surrounding gangue by grinding, so flotation can recover them. The reason the mill exists, and the step the mark on this site draws.
Gangue
The worthless rock the valuable mineral is locked in. The slate facets in the Orebex mark.
Froth
The mineral-laden bubble layer on a flotation cell. Its bubble size, velocity, stability and load are what Frothix reads to predict grade and recovery.
Collector, frother, depressant
The three reagent families in flotation: collectors make target minerals stick to bubbles, frothers stabilise the froth, depressants keep unwanted minerals down. Floatex doses all three under approval.
Grade and recovery
Grade is the metal content of the concentrate; recovery is the share of metal in the feed that reaches it. Pushing one usually costs the other, which is the trade-off Recovex solves.
Rougher, cleaner, scavenger
The stages of a flotation circuit: roughers make the first cut, cleaners raise the grade, scavengers recover what the roughers missed.
Cyclone
A hydrocyclone that classifies ground pulp by size: fines go to flotation in the overflow, coarse returns to the mill in the underflow. Separate-and-Classify moves cyclones online and off.
Thickener
A settling vessel that recovers water from concentrate or tailings. Bed pressure, underflow density and overflow clarity are what Thicken-and-Dewater watches.
Tailings
What is left after the valuable mineral is recovered. Metal that reaches the tailings is recovery lost, and tailings and water governance is a licence-to-operate matter.
Assay
The laboratory measurement of grade that confirms, hours later, what the circuit did. Orebex uses assays as the delayed labels for its predictions.
Genealogy
The record of a concentrate lot: blend, grind record, reagent and air moves, froth and grade reads, approvals, dewatering record, assays and disposition.
Pilot baseline
What a concentrator brings to the first meeting
The inputs for a baseline agreed in writing.
About the circuit
- Circuit type, the commodity and blends it runs and their geometallurgy status
- Mill, flotation, analyzer, dosing, dewatering, DCS and MES systems installed, with interfaces
- Froth camera and analyzer coverage by bank
- Shift pattern and who approves reagent-scheme changes
About the losses
- Recovery and grade per shift from assays
- Energy per tonne on grinding
- Reagent per tonne by reagent
- Water per tonne and water recovered
- Upsets, off-spec lots and penalty events
Reading
Where to go next
The pages that explain the mechanics.
Six layers, one loop
How the plant-edge runtime, orchestrator, agents, twin and cloud loop fit together.
How software is allowed to touch a circuit
The write path, the audit record and the data governance.
Three labelled walk-throughs
What a pilot on froth-vision recovery, grind-size energy or reagent dosing would do and measure.
Writing on recovery and autonomy
One point of recovery, autonomy as a dial, hit recovery before the shift.
Typed tools, declared limits
The SDK and CLI design previews.
Per circuit, per plant, per group
Tiers, the comparison table and the arithmetic a concentrator runs.
Run timeline · scenario
One scenario run, step by step
Every Orebex run is an ordered, inspectable sequence. This is run_4b9e27 on Line 1 · SAG and ball circuit, rougher bank 2 · copper porphyry blend. Scenario completes in 10 steps with one approval gate. P80 held at 148 µm as the blend hardened, froth stability recovered on rougher bank 2 after an air trim, a collector-dose change was approved by the shift metallurgist, predicted recovery held inside the plan, lot C-20931 released with full genealogy.
run_4b9e27
Line 1 · SAG and ball circuit, rougher bank 2 · copper porphyry blend
illustrative scenario
SUCCEEDED
-
01
ingest.shift
SUCCEEDED
0.7 s
Concentrator Orchestrator · Pulled the shift plan from the concentrator MES: copper porphyry blend B-14, P80 target 150 µm, concentrate grade at or above 25% Cu, recovery target per the geometallurgy model, energy and water budgets. Locked the operating envelope for the blend.
-
02
twin.simulate
SUCCEEDED
58 s
Concentrator Twin · Simulated 32 candidate grind, air and reagent schemes on the as-run twin for the hardening blend, ranked on predicted recovery, concentrate grade, kWh per tonne and water per tonne. Two candidates breached the thickener bed limit and were discarded.
-
03
grind.setpoint
SUCCEEDED
3 m 40 s
Crush-and-Grind · SAG-1 feed trimmed 3% and cyclone water raised as load and power signatures read a harder feed. P80 from the particle-size analyzer held at 148 µm against the 150 µm target; mill power stayed inside the energy budget.
-
04
froth.read
SUCCEEDED
continuous
Grade-and-Froth · Twelve froth cameras and the online XRF on rougher bank 2 fused at the edge. Froth stability on cells 3 and 4 fell as the blend hardened; predicted recovery drifted 0.4 points below plan. Early warning published to the control agents.
-
05
approve.human
APPROVAL
1 m 12 s
Concentrator Orchestrator · Scheme #7 raises collector dose 6% on rougher bank 2, above the standing reagent scheme. Reagent-scheme changes stay supervised on this blend, so the step was held for the shift metallurgist and approved at 07:19:44.
-
06
float.dose
SUCCEEDED
2 m 05 s
Float-and-Reagent · Approved collector dose applied with an air trim of 4% down on cells 3 and 4 inside the envelope. Froth stability recovered within eight minutes; predicted recovery returned to plan with concentrate grade read at 25.6% Cu.
-
07
classify.cyclone
SUCCEEDED
42 s
Separate-and-Classify · One cyclone brought online in cluster 1 as feed density rose with the hardness change, holding overflow size and circulating load inside the plan.
-
08
dewater.thickener
SUCCEEDED
continuous
Thicken-and-Dewater · Tailings thickener TH-2 flocculant dose trimmed as bed pressure rose; underflow density held and overflow clarity stayed inside the water-recovery target.
-
09
optimise.targets
SUCCEEDED
18 s
Throughput-and-Recovery · Whole-plant targets recomputed for the hardened blend: feed rate, P80, air and reagent targets handed to the control agents with recovery, grade, energy and water inside the budget. The losing candidates and their scores are in the run record.
-
10
lot.release
SUCCEEDED
1 m 30 s
Quality-and-Conformance · Concentrate lot C-20931 released: genealogy written (blend, grind record, reagent and air moves, froth and grade reads, approvals, dewatering record, assays as they land) and dispositioned against the concentrate spec with cited evidence for the metallurgist's sign-off.
Autonomy
Four levels, set per agent and per tag
A concentrator does not go from manual to unattended in one step. Orebex makes the level explicit, auditable and reversible at any time. The first release runs shadow mode, then assist mode, then bounded autonomy on low-risk grinding and flotation loops. Reagent-scheme changes stay supervised until the ore type is characterised.
| Level | What the agent does | What the human does | Where it sits in a pilot |
|---|---|---|---|
| L1 · Shadow | Reads froth, analyzer, particle, mill, flotation, dewatering, robot and MES signals; predicts and recommends; writes nothing | Runs the circuit as today; compares predictions to assays and metallurgist outcomes | Shadow mode, baseline measured first |
| L2 · Assist | Proposes grind, reagent, air, froth and dewatering moves with evidence, confidence, envelope and rollback path | Approves each action in the review console | Assist mode, the remainder of a 90 to 120 day pilot |
| L3 · Bounded | Executes pre-approved low-risk grinding and flotation loop moves: feed, water, air, level, flocculant, cyclones online, inside APC, DCS and envelope limits | Approves reagent-scheme changes and lot release | Graduated autonomy, after audited accuracy and ROI |
| L4 · Constrained auto-control | Supervised reagent-scheme adaptation for characterised ore types, across circuits and sites | Sets the envelope; reviews the shift record and the evaluation results | Planned; after golden-dataset evaluation, twin validation and metallurgist sign-off |
Accelerated computing
Physical AI, at the bank and the mill
Froth changes in seconds and a shift of feed is gone before the assay lands. Perception has to be local, deterministic and fast, so Orebex runs GPU inference at the plant edge and keeps training, simulation and optimisation in the cloud or on-prem.
Edge perception
8 to 24 froth cameras per bank at 15 to 30 FPS plus online XRF, particle-size, pump, level, air, reagent, density and energy streams fused at the plant edge. Sub-250 ms froth inference and local fail-safe through a network outage are the design targets. Jetson Thor is planned.
Model serving
Froth, particle and mineralogy, recovery prediction, time-series anomaly and metallurgy retrieval models behind one orchestrator at the plant edge, 20 to 60 per site as a design target, with versioned canaries and rollback.
Training
Froth segmentation, bubble velocity and stability, grade and recovery prediction, ore hardness, grind-size response, reagent response and metallurgy assistants trained on froth video, analyzer readings, telemetry and metallurgist corrections. 2,000 to 8,000 GPU-hours per commodity model family is the design target once partner data exists.
Concentrator twin
Grinding, flotation, classification and dewatering simulated as-run against as-designed before the shift. GPU comminution and DEM, flotation and geometallurgy simulation is the workload; physics-informed surrogates with Modulus are planned so schemes rank at production cadence.
Synthetic data
Rare froth-collapse, feed-upset, mineralogy-shift, equipment-drift and camera-fouling cases generated and validated against real assay distributions before promotion. 50k to 250k scenarios per commodity and circuit class is the design target.
Optimisation
Throughput, energy, water and reagent allocation and the grade and recovery trade-off solved before the shift and during upset recovery, and handed to the control agents as targets.
Robot sampling and handling
Sampling routes, reagent tote inspection and inspection rovers trained and validated in simulation before they run on site. Assistive until the safety case is proven.
GPU ETL
Daily features from froth, analyzer, mill, flotation, dewatering and genealogy telemetry for retraining, drift detection and recovery, energy, water and reagent benchmarks.
FAQ
Straight answers
The questions processing managers, metallurgists and sustainability leads ask in the first meeting.
Yes, but only within an explicit tag allow-list with per-tag rate and magnitude limits, inside the operating envelope for the blend, and only at the autonomy level your plant has set. Design partners start in shadow mode, where Orebex writes nothing. Reagent-scheme changes stay supervised by a named metallurgist until the ore type is characterised.
Control returns to the APC or DCS last known-good state. Orebex is a supervisory layer on top of the control systems and interlocks you already run, never a replacement for them, so an outage degrades the circuit to its current way of running, not to a stop. The edge is designed to run fail-safe through a network outage.
Advisory recommendations start from the twin and the shift plan in the first weeks. Froth, grade, recovery and grind-response prediction improve as circuit history and assay-labelled outcomes accumulate per ore type. The compute plan sizes training at 2,000 to 8,000 GPU-hours per commodity model family once partner data exists, a design target.
Only if you choose cloud training. Ore-body data, geometallurgy models, reagent schemes, process models and recovery records are isolated per tenant and never used to train another customer's models. A fully on-prem deployment at the plant edge is available for remote and IP-sensitive sites, and federated learning across sites is planned and waits on data-rights agreements.
You are, the same as with any control strategy, which is why every write is policy-checked, bounded, logged and reversible, and why anything above your risk threshold waits for a named approver. The audit log records the request, the evidence, the envelope applied and the human decision.
A paid pilot of 90 to 120 days on one grinding or flotation circuit, scoped to a single wedge with a success metric written into the order form: recovery gain, energy per tonne saved, water reduction or reagent per tonne. The first weeks baseline recovery, energy and water in shadow mode from your own assays and meters.
Get started
Bring the inputs, we bring the baseline
Start with one grinding or flotation circuit and one measurable baseline. A paid pilot on froth-vision recovery control, grind-size energy or reagent dosing shows the number before you commit further.