MODSIM + EMC + MatBal

MODSIM GUI is a desktop application for simulating mineral processing plants. You draw the flowsheet — crushers, mills, screens, cyclones, flotation cells — connect the streams, describe the ore feeding it, and run the simulation to see what every stream in the circuit carries. It is built on MODSIM, the Modular Simulator for Ore Dressing Plants created by Peter King and M. A. Ford and maintained today by Claudio Schneider, and is developed in collaboration with MODSIM's original authors — so the process models behind the numbers are the established ones. Two further tools ship alongside it, described below. The application is free to download and use.

Element-to-Mineral Conversion

A laboratory reports what an ore is made of as chemistry — so much iron, so much silicon, so much phosphorus. What a processing plant actually separates is minerals. This tool converts one into the other: paste an assay straight from a lab export, choose the minerals the ore is likely to contain, and read back how much of each is present. Just as importantly, it says whether the chemistry you have is enough to tell those minerals apart at all — an assay that cannot distinguish magnetite from hematite is one that every calculation method will still answer, confidently and wrongly.

Material Balance

Measurements from a plant survey never quite agree with each other: flows and assays are sampled with error, so nothing balances exactly. This tool reconciles them. Draw the circuit, enter what was measured and how far each measurement can be trusted, and it finds the closest set of flows and grades that does balance. What it says about the data matters as much as the balance itself — every measurement is reported with how far it had to be moved, so a badly sampled stream or a suspect assay stands out instead of being quietly absorbed into the answer.