The design of a new Process Plant, whatever the ore to be beneficiated, it’s not much different from any new-product development process. Process Plant Design needs to be understood as a complex and multi-dimensional process which usually has a unique solution that should be tailor-made to the ore to be processed. Unfortunately, there are more than a few examples of Process Plants that have taken many months before performing to the standards to which they were designed, or that never managed to achieve these standards at all. There have been a few cases of process plants that failed to work or had a botched start-up and needed major workovers before they could even start production on a consistent basis. This paper aims to stress the importance of adhering to the main phases of design or any industrial design for that matter –the information phase, the generation phase, and the testing and evaluation phase- as critical to the success of a plant design. A successful process plant design would have a short start-up which would rapidly ramp up production to the targeted throughput and recoveries without significant deviations on the estimated operating costs.
