The Brenda mine in B.C. was poor in terms of grade – 0.17% Cu and 0.04% Mo. But such poverty spurred Brenda’s technical people to introduce a wealth of technological innovations. Process technology and plant-wide automation were introduced very early into the operation. Computer-controlled grinding and crushing raised the incremental value of production by $3 million per year.
And now that the mine is no more, having been decommissioned successfully, the spirit of the enterprise survives in Brenda Process Technology. To date, the group has completed projects throughout Canada, the western U.S., Mexico, Chile and China. Process automation, with early successes at Hemlo and at Echo Bay’s Lupin mine, has been the company’s bread-and-butter.
The company has been built on a foundation of people with 20 to 30 years of practical hands-on metallurgical and process control experience. Superimposed on this is a group of younger metallurgists (some of them PhDs), and technical specialists with extensive knowledge in process control hardware and software. Brenda puts together teams to see an automation project through from preliminary justification and design to installation and commissioning.
Metallurgical Engineer Andrew Neale says process automation will continue as Brenda Process Technology’s mainstay. Recent independent surveys indicate that most operations in Canada have implemented some sort of regulatory control system using single-loop controllers, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), PC based systems or distributed control systems (DCSs).
However, only a handful of operations have successfully applied supervisory or advanced control strategies. As well as assisting busy plant engineers along the process control learning curve, Branda’s staff can implement real-time expert systems, adaptive control and a variation of Model Predictive Control (MPC) known as MOCCA.
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