HDR Scholarship - AI-driven Mineral Process Optimisation

Location

Geelong Waurn Ponds Campus (Australia)

Research topic

he project supports the research towards clean energy and battery storage technology.

The Australian mining industry, a pillar to the national economy, is striving for sustainable development amid rising resource demands.The current mineral process control strategies are limited by the system complexity, real-time adaptability, and sustainability integration, hindering energy efficiency and emission reductions. Collaborating with one of the largest suppliers of mining consumables and services in Australia, Molycop, this project seeks to create an intelligent system capable of accurately simulating and predicting the dynamics systems of mineral processing, and adaptively productive control and optimisation strategies to maximize the productivity and resource recovery, while minimizing the waste.

This PhD project is in collaboration with Molycop Australia.

Project aim

This project aims to develop a learning-based framework of dynamics modelling and process optimisation, with an application on Milling Circuit. Specifically, two main problems are defined:

Dynamics Modelling of Milling Circuit: How to leverage historical experimental and sensory data and prior knowledge of physics and empirical model equations (e.g. grinding kinetics) to model the dynamics of the milling circuit?
Efficient and Robust optimal control algorithms: How to develop a robust algorithm based on model predictive control or reinforcement learning that is capable of dealing with high-dimensional feature space and deep learning-based dynamical models for efficient control/optimisation?

Important dates

Applications will remain open until a candidate has been appointed

Benefits

This scholarship is available over 3 year with possibility of up to 6 months extension:

Stipend of $45,550 per annum tax exempt (2025 rate)
Relocation allowance of $500-1500 (for single to family) for students moving from interstate.
Contribution to research purposes including travel: $1,500 per annum for three years
International students only: Tuition fees offset for the duration of 4 years. Single Overseas Student Health Cover policy for the duration of the student visa.

Eligibility criteria

To be eligible you must:

be a domestic or international candidate. Domestic includes candidates with Australian Citizenship, Australian Permanent Residency or New Zealand Citizenship.
meet Deakin's PhD entry requirements
be enrolling full time and hold an honours degree (first class) or an equivalent standard master's degree with a substantial research component.

Additional desirable criteria:

a master’s degree in a field related but not limited to mining engineering, mechatronic engineering, electrical and electronics engineering
experience in exposure to mineral processes, in particular milling.
programming (Python) skills, familiar with optimal control or reinforcement learning.

Please refer to the research degree entry pathways page for further information.

How to apply

Please first contact Dr Tao Zhou to discuss the project and prepare the relevant documentation.
If you are successful, you will then be invited to submit a formal application.

HOW TO APPLY