Detecting changes in the operational states of hydrocyclones

Abstract

In this investigation, video recordings of the underflow discharge of a pilot plant hydrocyclone were collected during classification of different precious metal ores. The underflow shape was monitored bydetermining the underflow width along a horizontal line through the image. This was accomplished byemploying various noise reduction methods and identifying the flow boundaries via motion analysis.Subsequent monitoring of dilute, transitional and dense flow could be automated by embedding theunderflow width measurements and making use of one-class support vector machines to estimate thedistributional densities of the data in the resultant phase space. Experimental results suggest that theapproach could provide a practical and inexpensive means of monitoring the operational states ofhydrocyclones.