Abstract:

The trippers are equipments often found in mineral processing plants. Their role is to distribute ore coming from past stages of process in a silo with several hoppers. Positioning trippers is a scheduling problem defined by position determination of the equipment through the bins and along time. The system silo-tripper was modeled as a combinatorial linear optimization program aiming to get the optimal tripper positioning. Two paradigms were used to find out an exact solution: mixed integer linear programming and dynamic programming.