Copper processing automation is the use of field instruments, control systems, plant data and advanced process control to keep a copper plant stable and close to its targets, from the grinding circuit to the tankhouse.
Mipac has been doing this work since March 1997. Our first client was Mount Isa Mines in Queensland, a copper operation with a concentrator and a smelter. Copper has been part of how we work ever since, in concentrators, hydrometallurgical plants, smelters and tankhouses across Australia, Africa and the Americas.
Demand for copper is rising with electrification and the energy transition, while ore grades keep falling. That makes every point of recovery and every hour of uptime worth more, and an efficiently running plant is how an operation captures that opportunity. Our view on copper market conditions covers the outlook in more detail.
This article follows the copper processing route stage by stage. At each stage it covers what makes control difficult, what automation does about it, and where we have done that work.
What is copper processing automation?
Copper processing automation covers every layer of technology that measures, controls and improves a copper plant. Field instruments and analysers sit at the base. Above them are the control systems that run the process: PLCs, DCS and SCADA. Then come the historians, alarms and dashboards that give operators and managers visibility. At the top, advanced process control and analytics hold the plant closer to its optimum than manual operation can.
The aim is easy to state and hard to achieve: steady throughput, high recovery, consistent concentrate or cathode quality, and fewer surprises. Copper makes that harder than most commodities. Ore grades are falling, feed changes from shift to shift, and a single site can combine milling, flotation, hydrometallurgy, smelting and electrochemistry. Our article on declining ore grades at ageing copper plants covers the commercial pressure behind this.
Key facts
Where Mipac began: copper at Mount Isa, 1997
Mipac’s roots go back to the early 1970s, inside MIM Holdings at Mount Isa in north-west Queensland. MIM had an engineering group but no instrumentation and control team, so it started one and brought in engineer Max Kerr to build it. Many of the engineers who joined came up through apprenticeships, learning control systems on the plants they were keeping running.
In the late 1980s, MIM allowed the group to take on work outside the MIM group. The demand was there. On 3 March 1997 the team registered as Mipac, an independent company with 17 people and Bob Yench as its first managing director. Mount Isa Mines, with its copper concentrator and smelter, was the first client.
The way of working came with them. Bob describes a team that was “almost pedantic about our result for the customer”, and that standard still shapes how we work. Copper processing has been in our DNA from day one.
Recognition followed. In 2006 Mipac won a PACE Award for its work at Mopani Copper Mines in Zambia, and in 2009 a PACE Zenith Award for CellView®, its tankhouse cell voltage monitoring system.
The relationship continued long after 1997. In late 2013, Glencore engaged Mipac to merge two control rooms at the Mount Isa copper concentrator, combining control of the hyperbaric filter and wet fill areas so one operator could monitor both. The project also upgraded the control network from Yokogawa Vnet to Vnet/IP and redesigned operator screens around abnormal situation management.
How copper is processed, and where control matters at each stage
Most copper is produced by one of two routes.
- Sulphide ores are crushed, ground and concentrated by flotation. The concentrate is smelted and converted into anode copper, which is electrorefined into cathode.
- Oxide ores are leached with acid. The copper is then recovered from solution by solvent extraction and electrowinning (SX-EW).
Every stage has its own control problems, and problems at one stage travel downstream. Unstable grinding shows up as lost flotation recovery. Inconsistent concentrate shows up as smelter instability. That is why we look at a copper operation as a mining value chain, not a set of separate units.
Crushing and grinding
Grinding is usually the largest energy user in a concentrator. The control problem is balancing throughput, grind size and power draw while ore hardness changes underneath you. When mill load drifts, everything downstream feels it.
Good grinding control keeps SAG mill load and power stable, holds hydrocyclone pressure, and smooths sump levels so the circuit stops chasing itself. At Northparkes in New South Wales, Mipac designed and commissioned stable SAG mill power and load control, averaging level control on all sumps, and accurate hydrocyclone pressure control. The result was higher throughput, better circuit stability and longer SAG mill liner life. At Kamoto Copper Company in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we improved the control logic for the grinding mills, reducing downtime and increasing throughput.
More on this in our guide to SAG mill management.
Optimised grinding mills and CCD circuits, reducing downtime and increasing throughput.
Flotation
Flotation is where copper recovery is made or lost. Froth behaviour, reagent dosing and cell levels all respond to changes in feed, and operators often have limited instrumentation to work with.
At Northparkes, Mipac improved flotation level control across conventional and Jameson cells, including feedforward control, and specified a novel instrumentation solution for flash flotation density control. We also trained site personnel in practical loop tuning, so the gains stayed after the project team left. Read more in our practical guide to flotation circuit management.
Enhanced grinding mill and flotation control, improving stability and recovery rates.
Leaching and hydrometallurgy
Hydrometallurgical circuits depend on chemistry holding steady across variable feed: residence time, acid and reagent addition, pH and solids handling. In counter-current decantation (CCD), poor control of washing and thickener performance sends dissolved copper to tailings instead of to the next stage.
At Kamoto, a copper and cobalt operation, Mipac improved the control logic for the CCD circuit alongside the grinding work. Much of it was commissioned remotely during COVID-19 travel restrictions. Our guide to optimising leaching operations covers the wider control challenges.
Copper smelter automation
Smelters turn concentrate into anode copper through processes that need precision and resilience. Furnace stability, off-gas handling and energy use all respond to changes in feed chemistry, and a small instability becomes an expensive problem quickly. See challenges in today’s smelter operations for more.
At First Quantum Minerals’ Kansanshi smelter in Zambia, Mipac designed and configured the full plantwide control system for a greenfield smelter built to process 1.2 million tonnes of concentrate a year. The dual redundant Siemens PCS7 system runs five control rooms and 12 operator stations. Mipac designed 77 DCS cabinets, built in Australia and South Africa, and developed a plant-wide simulation that the smelter uses to train operators. The client reported reaching over 100 per cent of nameplate capacity within three months of start-up.
Years later, Mipac returned to upgrade the Kansanshi PCS7 system from V8.0 SP2 to V9.1, on a cutover timeline of twelve weeks from order to site execution.
Upgrade executed in 3 month window, bringing plant online with no outage after startup
Tailings
Tailings systems need reliable flow control and early warning, often with pumps and pipelines working near their limits. At Kansanshi’s copper concentrator, Mipac reworked the tailings circuit control. Flow is now set from neutralisation tank level using cascade control, with a pressure override on each pump so no line exceeds its rating. A multiple output controller shares the flow across all four pumps and lets the others ramp up when one is limited.
Operators now run the system in automatic continuously, with minimal manual intervention. The site expects even pump wear, less cavitation damage and longer pump life.
Tankhouse: electrorefining and electrowinning
The tankhouse is where copper becomes product, and quality cannot slip. Hundreds of cells need short circuits found fast, current efficiency held high, and electrolyte copper concentration kept on target. Let copper concentration fall too far and the risk of arsenic deposition and arsine gas generation rises.
Off-the-shelf hardware does not solve these problems well, so Mipac built its own instruments:
- CellView®: wireless cell voltage monitoring that detects short circuits early, without manual checks.
- ShortMeter®: fast, reliable detection of short circuits and dead plates.
- Copper Monitor®: continuous online measurement of copper concentration in electrolyte, using optical analysers, that feeds directly into the control system.
From late 2019, Mipac took on the design and supply of a fully automated copper refinery in the Commonwealth of Independent States. The scope ran from field instruments, control valves and motor control centres to the plantwide control system, automated crane movements with product tracking, an automated warehouse, and our Tankhouse Production Management System for production planning. The whole project was delivered remotely during COVID-19. Our article on optimising copper electrorefining goes deeper.
The automation stack in a copper plant
Performance problems rarely stay in one layer. An instrument drifts, a loop goes unstable, operators lose confidence in the screen, and the month finishes short. The mining automation pyramid describes the five layers involved:
- Field and electrical systems: instruments, analysers, motor control centres, remote I/O.
- Control systems: PLCs, DCS, SCADA, safety systems and industrial networks.
- Operations and information: historians, reporting, alarms and dashboards.
- Advanced control and optimisation: APC, analytics and digital twins.
- Business insights: turning operational data into business outcomes.
The table below maps some of our copper work against those layers and the stages of the copper route. Working across the whole stack is what lets us trace a problem back to where it starts and fix it there.
Every project in the graphic is linked in the sections above
Brownfield and greenfield copper plants
Copper plants come to us in two situations, and the starting point differs.
Building a new plant.
Decisions made at design stage shape how a plant performs for its entire life. At Cobre Panama, one of the largest new copper mines to start production since 2010, First Quantum Minerals engaged Mipac in 2015 as the main automation contractor. We designed, configured, commissioned and optimised a 50,000 I/O Siemens PCS7 control system, virtualised the operator interfaces, applied abnormal situation management and alarm management practice, and built operator e-learning and simulation packages. At full capacity the plant processes 100 million
Greenfield automation project with fast ramp-up to target production.
Running an existing plant.
The plant you have is not always the plant you need. At Quellaveco in Peru, the first large Peruvian mining project to adopt Siemens PCS7, Mipac resolved design and configuration issues, then provided training, remote commissioning and operations support.
Resolved design and configuration issues and improved plant process control strategies.
At Ok Tedi in Papua New Guinea, we developed an automation roadmap to upgrade ageing systems and bring in new technology in stages. At Kamoto and Kansanshi, targeted control changes delivered results without a full system replacement.
Developed an automation roadmap to upgrade aging systems and integrate new technologies.
Remote support and training run through both. Remote commissioning kept Kamoto on track during COVID-19, and remote access let Cobre Panama keep running when only limited staff could be on site. Training at Northparkes left site teams able to tune their own loops. Our commissioning service covers this in more detail.
Implemented advanced control strategies, stabilising production and optimising capacity.
What our copper work has taught us
- Stability comes before optimisation At Northparkes, throughput and liner life improved once SAG mill load and sump levels were stable. Advanced control works best on a plant that is already steady.
- Fix the measurement before the algorithm A control strategy is only as good as the signal it receives. Several of our copper projects started with instrumentation, not software.
- Commissioning is won before you reach site Simulation and operator training at Kansanshi and Cobre Panama meant teams arrived at start-up already knowing the system.
- Automation only sticks if operators trust it At Kansanshi's tailings circuit, the measure of success was operators leaving the system in automatic. Training and clear screens matter as much as the logic.
"You can tell if a control project has worked by walking into the control room six months later. If operators have left it in automatic, it's working. If they've gone back to manual, it hasn't, no matter what the commissioning report says."
Tim Hausler, Principal Control Systems Engineer, Mipac
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Your Trusted Partner in Automation of Copper Processing Plants
At Mipac, our deep expertise, innovative solutions, and collaborative approach make us an invaluable partner in copper processing. We understand the challenges you face because we’ve worked side by side with you to solve problems and deliver results. Whether you’re modernizing an existing plant, starting up a new operation, or looking to optimize your processes, we have the experience and solutions to help you achieve your goals.
Let’s work together to ensure your copper processing operations survive and thrive. Contact us today to discuss how we can help you overcome your unique challenges and drive your operations to new heights.
