Identification of Effective Factors on Mineral Processing Plant Site Selection and Ranking them by AHP Method

Selection of a mineral processing plant location, near a mine is one of the most important parameters that directly affect the mining process. If this stage executed properly, experts can expect that efficiency will increase and on the other hand costs and destructive effects on the environment will decrease, because of such a successful decision. Factors that effect on Plant location include economical, traditional, technological, technical and etc. In this paper many efforts was done to identify the effective factors and classify them in suitable categories. Factors were identified by library studies and some current problems, caused by unsuitable location, in a number of mineral processing plants. After this stage, expert's opinions were collected by using questionnaires in pair-wise comparisons. At the end, by using AHP Method and combining 5 expert's opinions in different fields (Mining exploration, Mining excavation, Rock mechanics, Mineral processing, and Mining management), affecting factors were ranked.

Keywords:

Mineral Processing Plant Location , Site Selection , Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP