INRTU Presents a Gold Processing Plant Device at Automation Systems Conference, Novokuznetsk

On December 10-12, the Siberian State Industrial University (SibSIU, Novokuznetsk) held the All-Russian Automation Systems Scientific and Practical Conference (AS'2024) with international participation. More than 100 reports were presented at the forum, one of which was prepared by third-year INRTU students Dmitry Makletsov and Artem Rokhmanov. They told about a device capable of automatically measuring sodium cyanide concentration in solutions at gold processing plants (GPP).

Students noted that sodium cyanide is widely used not only in the production of precious metals, but also in electroplating and chemical industry. The reagent is toxic, deficiency or excess of the substance leads to incomplete extraction of the valuable component from ore, material costs and others. Enterprises need systems capable of controlling the sodium cyanide consumption. INRTU engineers consider the development of a device based on the principle of potentiometric titration to be the most expedient solution.

"The work is carried out in several stages - the creation of devices for measuring sodium cyanide concentration in pure solutions, followed by industrial samples representing slurries.

We assembled a setup consisting of a programmable controller, a graphical output screen, a signal input module from the measuring electrodes, and a measuring cell. We also used a gold electrode and a reference electrode, a magnetic stirrer and a special pump. Silver nitrate solution was used for titration. Comparative analysis of the data from the manual and automatic processes showed that in the latter case the error is within the acceptable limits of the reference method," says Dmitry Makletsov.

The development of such equipment on the basis of domestic components allows to reduce the dependence on expensive foreign analogues, to improve the control of technological processes and to increase the environmental safety of production. The next stage of research is to carry out measurements in solutions with interfering ions and to evaluate their influence on the measurement process.

The "Avtomatika" (Automation) engineering student center serves as an experimental platform for the plant developers. The project is headed by Aleksandr Ovsyukov, Associate Professor of the Department of Automation and Control, and Alexey Kolodin, Senior Lecturer.

The INRTU students' report has been included in the RSCI (Russian Science Citation Index) indexed collection. The electronic version will be published on the SibSIU website.