Track: Systems Engineering

Abstract

The fourth industrial revolution is being fostered in many countries to make more efficient and flexible plants. Industry 4.0 target is to get a more competitive industry. Under this framework, improvement of mineral processing requires knowledge of previous methods and current technology in order to develop new techniques and approaches. As phosphate deposition decreases, the need for new recovery methods keeps growing. From this perspective, the need for control and optimization of existing processes becomes a necessity. It also includes the development of equipment with more advanced digitized components. The objective of our work is to develop a model of a process plant using SysML. In this paper, we adopted a system engineering-based approach, which consists on modeling and formalizing knowledge collected in the field. A well understanding of phosphate value chain allows both driving and optimizing current processes. In addition, we used this approach to model information flows in which we integrated a specific equipment in the overall process. This model will follow a systems engineering approach. In this paper we present the development of the SysML model of a process plant (Wash plant of phosphate). The model includes the requirements as well as the structure, behaviour and activity diagrams. A specific type of mining processes were studied with aim of giving feedback on the implementation of system modeling for mineral processing.