Optimal Production Planning for Primary Copper Production

The production of copper with the classical Outokumpu process comprises several, individual processing steps that are influenced by one another, and by external factors such as raw-material amount and - quality. Running every sub-process at its local optimum often leads to a highly sub-optimal and inefficient operation of the plant as a whole. Bottlenecks or shortfalls occur as sub-processes do not consume or produce at the same rate. Due to the existence of unpredictable disturbances, the task of production optimization is far from trivial. ABB's copper plant optimization tool helps to find the best response to various situations. Copper is man's oldest metal, known and being used for more than 10,000 years. It playes still an important role in our everyday life. The "red gold" is used in a wide range of applications, including construction, electrical and electronic products, transportation, consumer products and industrial equipment. Copper can commonly be found in products from the automotive, marine, piping and telecommunication industries. Curiously, a wide variety of vegetables, fruits, grains, dried beans, nuts, meats, seafood and chocolate, as well as drinking water contain small amounts of copper, which is essential to human health. Copper is also the material of the future, owing to its unique material properties and practically 100 percent ability to be recycled: Copper does namely not degrade, neither in quality nor value, during re-processing. The global copper consumption has increased by more than 25 percent in the last 10 years, mostly in the fastgrowing Asian economies. Copper is today, like crude oil, traded with fixed global and the price has increased by 600% in the last 6 years (Fig. 1). The continuing demand urge for making the existing plant more efficient.