Sustainable Mining and Metallurgy

The minimum diameter of the deep cone thickener is determined by its unit area processing capacity. The cone angle is generally taken as the empirical value of 30°-60°. In the design, they are taken by experience according to the basic properties of the material, which has certain subjective blindness. In this paper, the diameter and cone angle of deep cone thickener were optimized by numerical simulation. Firstly, the underflow concentration at different time points after feeding was obtained by carrying out the thickening experiment on the large-scale model thickening experimental machine with diameter d=180mm and height h=2m. Then, the experimental results were compared with the simulation results. The results show that the root mean square error is less than 0.5, which verifies the accuracy of the simulation results. Finally, based on the actual situation of a mine, the cone angle and diameter of the deep cone thickener are optimized by simulation technology. The results show that under the condition that the unit area processing capacity of the deep cone thickener is 40t/h, the cone angle of the thickener is 30° and the diameter is 11m, the underflow concentration is the highest in the same time, and the time to reach the highest concentration is the shortest. The simulation solves the subjective blindness problem in the parameter design of deep cone thickener, which can be promoted and applied.