Material balancing-a generalized solution method

A method for the solution of material balancing problems encountered in mineral processing is described. The method makes use of the highly structured nature of the equations encountered, thus resulting in savings in computer storage space and computation time. One ofthe key advantages of the method is that it is presented in a very general way and can therefore be used to solve a wide variety of balancing problems. In particular, the method enables constraints imposed upon individual streams (e.g., sum of size distribution must equal 100\s%) to be handled at very little extra cost, whereas most other balances tend not to deal with these sorts of constraints.